Ireland accounted for 100 of the 658 seats at Westminster during this period, the Members being returned from 66 constituencies: 32 counties, 33 boroughs (two of which, Cork and Dublin, returned two Members) and one university (Trinity College, Dublin). From the general election of 1820 to the dissolution in late 1832, 245 individuals filled these 100 seats, including the venerable Member for Dublin Henry Grattan I, who died without being able to re-enter the chamber, and the Anglicized former Member for Leicester Robert Otway Cave, who took his seat for Tipperary on the last sitting day of the unreformed Parliament. The majority (212) of them were Irishmen, of whom most only ever represented one Irish county or borough, sometimes for many years beforehand or for long afterwards; just ten sat for two separate Irish constituencies during this period, while Daniel O’Connell represented three counties, and 31 others sat for at least one different Irish seat either before 1820 or after 1832. Sixteen (including five who sat for more than one Irish seat in this period) were also returned for one or two non-Irish seats at some point between 1820 and 1832, and ten others (including Richard Wellesley, who sat for three different English boroughs before being brought in for Ennis) were so returned outside this period.

The remaining 33 of the 245 Irish Members (at 13 per cent, a much higher rate of interloping than occurred in Scotland or Wales, but roughly equal to the 15 per cent rate that applied in the previous period) comprised 29 Englishmen (four of whom represented two different Irish constituencies and the remainder one), three Scots (James Farquhar, James Edward Gordon and Sir William Rae) and a Welshman (Thomas Frankland Lewis). Over half of them enjoyed longer parliamentary careers elsewhere, but 14 only ever represented Irish constituencies, including eight whose membership of the Commons occurred only during this period. About 40 other Irishmen obtained a seat in the Commons at some time between 1820 and 1832, almost invariably in England, though a handful had previously represented an Irish seat at Westminster (for instance, Lyndon Evelyn and William Ormsby Gore); none who survived into the reformed Parliament seem later to have availed themselves of an Irish berth. A few of these Irishmen exiled in England, notably the bellicose anti-Catholic Tories William Henry Trant and Frederick William Trench, plus the Grey ministry’s solicitor-general for Ireland Philip Crampton, were active on Irish affairs in Parliament.

The Irish Members, who formed about a seventh of the Commons membership at any one time, and so dwarfed the Welsh and Scottish contingents (which together made up under a tenth of the House), were viewed with disdain and suspicion within the chamber long after the Union of 1801, partly because the process of unifying the Irish and British administrative systems continued to move so slowly.1 For all that they took their seats as equals with their British counterparts, their mode of election contributed to set them apart. By the Irish Catholic Relief Act of 1793 (33 Geo. III, c. 21 [I]), Catholics could qualify as electors (although in reality only as freeholders, since the Protestant corporations maintained a sectarian exclusiveness among the freemen voters). This development, which had a profound impact on Irish electoral history in the 1820s, was not the case until after 1829 in Britain (where, however, the Catholics were in a minority). By a law passed in 1800 specifying how Irish peers and Members were to be incorporated into the Westminster Parliament (40 Geo. III, c. 29 [I]), a measure which accompanied the respective countries’ Acts of Union (40 Geo. III, c. 38 [I], and 39 & 40 Geo. III, c. 67 [GB]) and was effectively Ireland’s first ‘Reform Act’, 83 predominantly rotten boroughs were disfranchised; together with those saved, these had accounted for 78 per cent of the membership of the Dublin Commons (roughly proportional to the 83 per cent that borough Members accounted for in England or the 77 per cent that they accounted for in the whole of Britain at the time). The Irish borough representation was thus reduced to 35 seats (from 33 cities or towns), about half the unchanged county membership of 64 (from 32 counties), with Trinity’s now single seat providing the hundredth Member.

Ireland’s unique system of freeholder registration also created a significantly different framework to elections in counties and county boroughs (those in which not only the freemen but also the freeholders had the vote). The qualification for county electors, as in England, was possession in fee simple or, more usually, of a lease for a life (or lives), of freehold property yielding, after the payment of rent and other charges, a clear yearly value of at least 40s. (£2) of ‘profit’ or ‘beneficial interest’. Unlike in England, however, a freeholder had to prove his title before the clerk of the peace at the quarter sessions in order to obtain a certificate permitting him to vote, and had to have held this certificate for at least a year before being able to do so. In practice, an Irish freeholder could be (and was) challenged over the validity of his vote, at the polling booth, just as easily as was an English freeholder presenting himself to vote. But during the eight years that the certificates were valid, holders sometimes moved or died without the certificates necessarily being surrendered, which created scope for numerous abuses, including personation, a crime apparently almost unknown in Britain. Even though qualifications obtained at the higher rates of £20 or £50 were not subject to renewal, fears of being dunned with higher rent demands meant that most tenants (if they were in any case given a choice in the matter, since the cost was usually borne by the landlord) were qualified at the minimum 40s. level, so producing a much more flat-bottomed structure to the freeholder electorate than was believed to be the case in England. On the basis of figures collected in 1815, nearly 184,000 or 88 per cent of the (probably inflated) total of about 208,400 county freeholders were 40s. voters.2

However, the main impact of the registration system—apart from enormously distorting the contemporary figures for county electorates—was partially to displace the complex process of electoral management from the immediate pre-election campaign (an event occurring at irregular intervals), to the long preceding registration process itself (a task requiring almost continuous attention). To give one example, it was essential for a territorial magnate to avoid having his tenants’ names temporarily removed from the list of voters, as happened during the year-long pre-qualification period incumbent on reregistering those whose certificates had nearly expired, when an election actually took place. Such an experienced landlord as the veteran Member for Louth John Foster, the last Speaker of the Dublin Parliament, was reluctant to reregister on his estates after the 1818 general election because George III’s precarious state of health was thought likely to precipitate another dissolution (as it did in 1820). Nevertheless, even he suffered the indignity of having 105 of his tenants prevented from voting in 1826 because of a technical irregularity.3 It was not unknown for the untimely death of the (usually unrelated) person whose name was entered in the lease to disqualify a whole swathe of freeholders at the wrong moment; this was apparently the fate of Evelyn John Shirley, a Warwickshire gentleman, in Monaghan in 1830, when his share of the tenant voting strength declined markedly.4

What the electoral registers also provided, so long as they were kept up-to-date and were capable of being analysed accurately by the parties concerned, was a method of predicting the outcome of a contest. This kind of ‘virtual’ poll sometimes became, in effect, the ‘election’ itself, in that it was often preferable for those involved to settle the matter on the basis of the registries than to have recourse to the trouble and expense of a real contest. In some cases, an examination of the registers clearly frightened off a potential challenger, who realised, as did Sir James Matthew Stronge in Tyrone in 1830, that it would be a hopeless task to try to overcome the potential tenant voter strength that could be fielded by the leading interests. At other times, the information available in the registers must have informed the detailed negotiations that usually preceded a county election and may quite frequently have determined the compromises and coalitions decided on by rival electoral patrons; it certainly did before the 1826 election in county Wexford, where the collapse of the registered voter strength of Viscount Stopford’s family interest forced him into coalition with his colleague and political opponent Robert Shapland Carew. Numerous examples of such considerations, plus endless discussions of the ramifications of sharing each others’ tenants’ second votes, can be found in the political correspondence of the period.5 Arguably it was the experience they had gained of the Irish system that enabled such amphibious magnates as the 3rd marquess of Londonderry, who had inherited vast estates in counties Down and Durham, to be quick off the mark in exploiting the post-1832 registration system in Britain.

As well as pre-1800 Irish legislation, notably the 1795 Act consolidating the electoral laws (35 Geo. III, c. 29 [I]), which continued to apply,6 elections were governed by a number of specifically Irish statutes passed at Westminster after the Union. Among these, one in 1805 extended from six to twelve months the period for which freeholders had to be registered before being enabled to vote, and another in 1817 limited the duration of county elections to 30 days, required booths to be subdivided if more than 2,000 freeholders were registered and allowed returning officers to terminate polls after the fourth day if fewer than 20 had voted during the day. Sir Henry Parnell’s Irish Elections Act (60 Geo. III & 1 Geo. IV, c. 11), which was given royal assent on 28 Feb. 1820, reduced the maximum duration of polls to 15 days and the maximum size of booths to 800 voters. It stipulated that election returns should include the names of the candidates and the number of votes received by each of them, a novelty unknown in England.7 In another departure, which provided contemporaries with more accurate figures for the potential number of voters, clerks of the peace were required to print lists of registered freeholders at the beginning of each year, as well as to take care to retain such records as pollbooks (few of which, however, now survive).8 A select committee reported the following session that the Act had been effective in reducing the length, cost and illegality of contests, but that the expenses imposed on candidates by election officials had become exorbitant.9 This criticism was redressed by the Irish Election Expenses Act of 1821 (1 & 2 Geo. IV, c. 58). In 1823 another Act (4 Geo. IV, c. 55) applied the provisions of the 1820 measure to freeholders voting in county boroughs. It also required corporations to allow their freemen’s admissions books to be inspected, directed returning officers not to close polls on the excuse of unrest and tightened up the rules against treating. In boroughs such as Galway these provisions were honoured only in the breach. The obscurity, venality and boisterous nature of Irish elections, which the inhabitants regarded with a good deal of forbearance if not outright pride, helped give the Irish electoral system its separate identity.

It was said that Parnell had obtained the 1820 Act ‘without making a single observation as to the nature of his measure in any stage of its progress’, and yet it had the significant effect of making it much easier for less wealthy freeholders to be enfranchised, a facility that was abundantly exploited by pro-Catholic campaigners. The well informed (and anti-Catholic) John Leslie Foster, who admittedly had an axe to grind in that his late uncle’s interest in county Louth had been undermined by this development, complained to Robert Peel, the home secretary, in December 1828 that

by the 44th section of that Act, any persons who are pleased to swear that they have 40s. freeholds not arising from leaseholds may register them, and are excused from the necessity of even swearing that they occupy their freeholds. Under this law multitudes have been registered who pay no rent, who have no landlords, but who have established themselves on the edges of commons or bogs, or who have been enfeoffed by persons who had no more title than themselves. Of all classes of Irish freeholders these are by far the most objectionable, and they owe their introduction ... solely to the operation of this recent statute.10

In many ways the laws and practices governing registration determined the size of the electorate and the outcome of elections in Ireland up to 1832 and beyond, just as they were to do in England after the Reform Act.11

However, what most set Ireland apart in the early nineteenth century, not least because of the endemic and visceral ‘No Popery’ feeling displayed by xenophobic Britons, was the religious composition of its population. The Catholics formed a large majority and, notwithstanding the introduction of partial relief measures, they remained excluded from the higher echelons of the central administration in Dublin and most of the organs of local government. Particularly in the municipal corporations, few of which were open to Catholics, even in terms of admission to the freedom, a rigid (and often moribund) Protestant ascendancy resisted any encroachments on its powers. Anti-Catholic sentiment was particularly pronounced in the northern counties of Ulster, the only province in which Protestants formed a significant proportion of the population; many of the inhabitants, being the descendants of Scots settlers, were Presbyterians, a group from which hardly any Irish Members originated. Economic variations, while not entirely mirroring the religious ones, accentuated the geographical differences within Ireland, where the west and south-west were the most likely, but by no means the only, areas to be hard hit by periodic downturns, as during the agricultural depression in 1822. Outbreaks of serious unrest, whether motivated by commercial distress or religious antagonism, occurred regularly and required frequent legislative (and police and military) intervention between the skirmishing of the Ribbonmen in several western counties in early 1820 and the serious rioting in Queen’s County in 1832; county Tipperary had an unmatched reputation for lawlessness.12 Disturbances could easily spill over into violence during contests, and it was a noteworthy that the military were routinely deployed to parliamentary boroughs at election time, the opposite of what happened in England, where any such action would have been construed as constitutionally insensitive.13

If early nineteenth-century Ireland differed greatly from England in terms of its social and political background, it also differed in its pattern of election contests. This divergence, which helps to illustrate the main developments in Ireland in this period, can be shown by the following table.

Comparison of English and Irish contests, at general elections, between two consecutive periods, by type of constituency:

	England		Ireland
	1806-18	1820-31	1806-18	1820-31
Counties	33	40	31	47
Boroughs	246	277	24	34
Universities	2	2	3	2
Total	281	319	58	83
Rate of contests	29%	33%	22%	31%

Certainly, there was a superficial similarity between the experience of the two countries. Both England and Ireland had more contests at the elections of 1820, 1826, 1830 and 1831 together, than they had during the comparable period immediately preceding it (covered by the general elections of 1806, 1807, 1812 and 1818). Moreover, the overall rate of contests in Ireland rose to just under the (only slightly raised) English figure, so bringing the countries more into line with each other. However, between the two periods the number of contests in England (which had 245 constituencies) rose by only 14 per cent, but the number in Ireland (66 constituencies) grew by 43 per cent, with its rate of contested elections increasing substantially from 22 to 31 per cent.

Three further observations can be made. First, although in both countries there was a greater proportional growth in the number of county contests than in the number of borough ones, in Ireland the former rose by 52 per cent, compared with 21 per cent in England. In this period there were an average of 11.75 Irish county contests at each election, compared to only 7.75 in the years 1806-18 (in England, where there were 25 per cent more counties, the average rose to 10 from 8.25). This emphasizes the importance of contests in the Irish counties and hints at the role played by the lower ranks of the freeholders. Yet interestingly (and perhaps surprisingly), the rate of county contests rose after the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders in 1829: 16 occurred at the elections of 1820 and 1826 (at an average of eight), but 31 took place in 1830 and 1831 (at an average of 15.5).

Second, even though the six times larger set of English boroughs continued to be contested at a higher rate than the Irish ones (30 per cent to 18 per cent for 1806-18 and 34 per cent to 26 per cent for 1820-31), the latter (albeit from a naturally much lower base) rose by a much higher proportion between the two periods: by 42 per cent rather than 13 per cent. In addition, the largest subgroup, the freeman boroughs (92 out of 203), accounted for 146 (or 59 per cent) of contests between 1806 and 1818 and for 165 (or 60 per cent) between 1820 and 1831, while in the eight freeholder boroughs there were only nine and eight contests respectively. But in Ireland the eight county boroughs, which made up only a quarter of the whole, accounted for over half the borough contests in each period: 14 out of 24 (1806-18) and 18 out of 34 (1820-31). Moreover, the freeholder borough of Mallow (uncontested between 1806 and 1818) was contested in 1820 and 1826, and the freeholder and householder borough of Dungarvan (contested once between 1806 and 1818) was also contested in 1830. Unlike in England, therefore, freeholders eligible to vote in Irish boroughs contributed significantly to the increased rate of contested elections.

Third, if in the previous period the trend of contests had gone different ways, with England’s holding steady until experiencing a spike in 1818 and Ireland’s rising to a peak in 1812 before falling back again, in this period the trend of contests per election was in the same direction in both countries, first up (from a very low rate in 1820 to a very high maximum in 1830) and then down again in 1831.

Comparison of English and Irish contests, at general elections, by type of constituency:

	England				Ireland
	1820	1826	1830	1831	1820	1826	1830	1831
Counties	9	10	10	11	3	13	18	13
Boroughs	60	74	76	67	7	5	14	8
Universities	0	1	0	1	0	0	1	1
Total	69	85	86	79	10	18	33	22
Rate	28%	35%	35%	32%	15%	27%	50%	33%

Yet, despite the fact that it was in England that the rate of contests first rose to a high point, in 1826, the comparative rise in the rate was much more marked in Ireland and especially in its counties that year (albeit from a low base). At the following general election, in 1830, half the Irish constituencies were contested, and this time it was in the boroughs that the largest increase took place. In 1831 Ireland’s rate of contests fell slightly, to a level equal to the average rate for England for this period.

For all that contests can be deemed only a very inexact indicator of political activity (still less used as an accurate measure of changes of policy or partisanship among the Members returned), these results give a good indication of the contours of Ireland’s electoral history between 1820 and 1832. The following sections will investigate: the counties, with particular attention to the role of the campaign for Catholic relief, as well as to the impact of the Irish Franchise Act of 1829 on the size of the county electorate; the boroughs, with an emphasis on the central part played by the county boroughs, especially in terms of the increasing movement that ‘independents’ made towards opening the representation; and the Members, with respect to their composition and collective political behaviour. The conclusion gives a short account of how the Irish Reform Act affected the Irish constituencies in 1832.

 

The Counties

1

The counties continued to be largely the preserve of the Irish nobility. In one sense, this was simply a truism, since long service in delivering a county seat to government was one of the best recommendations for the conferral of a peerage (or promotion within the Irish peerage, or the grant of a United Kingdom peerage or election to the representative peerage, as the case might be).14 Carew, Whig Member for county Wexford on his family’s interest, was not the only pretender to this dignity who deployed just such an argument in this period, though the Grey and Melbourne ministries kept him waiting for an Irish barony until 1834 and for an English one until 1838. With the exceptions of Carlow, Dublin, Galway and especially Sligo, where the gentry mostly had things their own way, there was hardly a county where an aristocratic patron did not return at least one Member. In Cavan, where the Lords Farnham had long held a hereditary lien on one seat, they also had a large say in the choice of an acceptable anti-Catholic Member for the second. Likewise in Wicklow, the 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam’s Whig Member was nominated without opposition, but the occupant of the other seat, which was ostensibly the preserve of the independent gentry, invariably had to have received his blessing.

Among a plethora of usually unacknowledged electoral compacts, the 2nd earl of Rosse shared the representation of King’s County with the 1st earl of Charleville, and his aunt, the dowager countess of Rosse, split Longford’s with the 6th earl of Granard. (Lady Antrim in Antrim and Lady Glengall in Tipperary were other female patrons equally intrepid in the execution of their electoral machinations.) Several counties—Cork, Limerick, Monaghan and Wexford would be good examples—exhibited a range of peers or gentry landlords in actual or potential possession, either contentedly allied with a congenial and (generally) stronger magnate, or biding their time in the hope of eventually exploiting an opening. A dominant territorial interest, such as the 3rd duke of Leinster’s in Kildare, could survive even the mishap of his brother Lord William Fitzgerald’s retirement in 1831, but most patrons were vulnerable to sustained assault by a rival who had prepared the ground. The 2nd marquess of Donegall, benefiting from his proximity to the struggle, finally won Antrim for his heir Lord Belfast from the absentee 3rd marquess of Hertford in 1830. The leading Catholic peers, the 8th earl of Fingall and the 2nd earl of Kenmare, were eventually able to return their son and brother for Meath and Kerry respectively. In all, about 30 peers directly returned their heirs or younger sons for county seats on their own interests during this period; adding in the half-a-dozen or so brothers and a similar number of other relatives indicates that at least a third of the 140 Members who only sat as representatives of Irish counties in this period (another seven also came in at some point for a borough) owed their return to the dominance of the aristocracy.

About a dozen Irish peers had interests in more than one county. Few could match the reach of the Beresfords—headed by the 2nd marquess of Waterford and his brothers Lord Beresford and Archbishop Beresford of Armagh—who could boast of returning a Member for both Waterford (Lord George Beresford) and Londonderry (George Dawson), until undone by the Catholic question in each case. But the 3rd earl of Kingston and his brother Viscount Lorton, who had electoral interests in at least five counties, brought in their respective sons for Cork and Roscommon, and backed their brother Henry King in Sligo. Several peers had ambitions to seat family members in two separate counties, as the 1st earl of Listowel managed briefly with his son and grandson in Cork and Kerry; by contrast, the 2nd Baron Rossmore, whose son Henry sat for Monaghan, failed to get a younger son in for King’s in 1831. The 1st Marquess Conyngham, who abandoned the representation of Clare at the start of this period and did not interfere in Meath, where he had his principal estates, brought in two of his sons in succession for Donegal. The only non-noble landowner to compete with this scale of influence was the self-made man Luke White, who provided two of his sons with seats for counties Dublin and Leitrim, and tried his hand in Longford for a third (with posthumous success).

Apart from the Beresfords, who at times played an active role in four different boroughs, and the 3rd marquess of Downshire and Donegall, who each laid claim to influence the return in two boroughs, at least another 12 peers with significant county interests were also patrons of a borough. In almost all cases, these were boroughs lying in the same geographical location, as in the instances of the 1st marquess of Ormonde in Kilkenny (county and borough) and the 1st earl of Limerick in the eponymous county and city; however, Charleville added his pocket borough of Carlow to his half-share in King’s county and the 2nd Viscount Gort joined his declining influence in Limerick to his partial interest in county Galway. At least five of the Irish Members were in the same position: Sir Edward O’Brien and William Vesey Fitzgerald in Ennis and Clare, James Daly in Galway and county Galway, Owen Wynne in Sligo and county Sligo, and William Bagwell in Clonmel and county Tipperary. The 6th duke of Devonshire, who had substantial interests in counties Cork and Waterford (and in the boroughs of Bandon Bridge, Dungarvan and Youghal), the 2nd and 3rd marquesses of Hertford (who also nominated the Member for Lisburn), and Fitzwilliam were non-resident Englishmen with sizeable English electoral empires. Another notable absentee landlord was Lord Londonderry from 1822 (after the death of his father and half-brother, the 1st and 2nd marquesses), who had a stake in counties Down and Londonderry. More typical was the 2nd marquess of Thomond, one of several noblemen to absent themselves from Clare.

Anglo-Irish peers also domiciled in England included the 3rd earl of Bessborough, although his heir Viscount Duncannon resided on the family’s Irish estates for part of the time that he was Member for county Kilkenny. The 2nd Baron Dunalley, who sat for Okehampton, had a small interest in Tipperary, as did the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, an Englishman who took an active concern in his Irish estates, in Sligo. Lord Clifton, Member for Canterbury, the heir to the Irish peer Lord Darnley of Cobham Hall, Kent, contemplated reviving the family’s interest in Meath, where he took up residence in 1831 as a condition of being appointed as the county’s lord lieutenant, but his brother was defeated at a by-election for the county late that year. The 5th duke of Manchester’s son Lord Mandeville, who in fact came in for Huntingdonshire, was another Member who was attracted by the prospect of building up a county interest in this period, in his case through his wife’s estates in Armagh. Of a handful of English aspirants, only Shirley managed to make his way into an Irish county seat, which he did by taking up residence and manufacturing enough freeholders to give him a temporary superiority in Monaghan, where the Ipswich and Maldon Member Thomas Barrett Leonard also had a landed interest. (The only other Englishmen to sit for an Irish county were the 2nd marquess of Hertford’s nephew Hugh Seymour and grandson Lord Beauchamp in Antrim.)

Yet the Irish gentry, too, were a formidable force in county politics. Sometimes, of course, an untitled interest sheltered under the friendly cover of an aristocratic connection; for example, Alick Stewart in Londonderry sat not only on the interest of his father, but of his uncle, the 1st marquess, and his cousins the 2nd and 3rd marquesses of Londonderry. Likewise, the knight of Kerry (Maurice Fitzgerald) benefited from the protection of Kenmare in Kerry, and George Vaughan Hart continued to sit for Donegal on the dormant Abercorn interest. But at least 40 county Members elected in this period were directly brought in on their own, or, in the cases of James Browne, Lucius O’Brien and Montagu Chapman, on their father’s interests, and over a third of the county Members were brought in primarily on gentry interests. (Carew and Vesey Fitzgerald’s ailing fathers survived into this period, but had each now ceded control of the family’s electoral concerns, in Wexford and Clare respectively, to their sons.) With the exception of the Whites, already mentioned, no gentry interest extended into more than one county, and only Thomas Kavanagh, the ‘monarch’ of Carlow, succeeded in gaining both seats in a county, when he brought in his son-in-law and himself in 1826 and 1830. However, some non-noble families, like the Archdalls in Fermanagh or the Frenches in Roscommon, already had a record for continuous occupation of one county seat stretching back well into the eighteenth century.

Several other ‘commoner’ electoral patrons, such as Sir Edward O’Brien or William Macnamara in Clare, considered themselves less as country gentlemen on the English model than as descendants of ancient princely houses; like the knight of Kerry, the O’Conor Dons (father and son) had a clanship title to prove it (but the O’Gorman Mahon’s was a travesty which befitted his lack of a sizeable landed estate). Gentry electoral patrons were, therefore, more than equal to the task of maintaining and defending their influence. On occasion this was exercised through a coalition of roughly similar interests, such as those of O’Brien and Vesey Fitzgerald in Clare. Denis Browne, who in this period came in for Kilkenny borough, exercised paramount authority, on behalf of his nephew the 2nd marquess of Sligo, in county Mayo, where his radical kinsman Dominick Browne filled the other seat. Rivalry between different branches of a family, as in Mayo, could lead to serious electoral consequences, for instance producing a series of contests between the Hamiltons in Dublin. More typical, perhaps, was the co-operation shown between the leading gentry and leading aristocratic interests in a county, notably in Donegal (between Hart and Lord Conyngham), Kildare (between Robert Latouche and the duke of Leinster) and Westmeath (between Gustavus Hume Rochfort and Lord Longford).

Landlord influence, whether exercised by a wealthy peer on the basis of a huge territorial interest or by a relatively minor gentry family with a well-husbanded fund of deferential popularity, was ultimately founded on freeholder numbers. The multiplication of 40s. freeholds, which had calamitous economic consequences, is not now thought to have been simply the result of a scramble for electoral advantage, though that was certainly one factor behind the trend (for instance, on the Downshire estates in Down prior to 1820). Moreover, a patron’s supremacy was not necessarily derived wholly from having a majority on the registries. Just as important, in practice, was the perceived authority with which that interest was exercised and the successful defence of an established position could have a tremendous significance. For example, at the general election of 1826, Listowel’s registries had actually expired in Cork, but his son Lord Ennismore held his nerve to retain his seat unopposed. Generally speaking, county Members in actual possession were rarely challenged at a general election, and an heir standing for his late father’s seat at a by-election (as happened twice in Roscommon in this period) was unlikely to be opposed. In the aftermath of a severe contest, which, like the one in Limerick in March 1830, revealed the relative strength of the interests and served as a reminder of the trouble and expense involved, the status quo was unlikely to be disturbed again in a hurry.

The cultivation of an interest could be just as significant as its size, so that constant residence and attention to local concerns were important determinants of tenant loyalty at elections. A judicious distribution of government patronage to friends, in the form of appointments to minor offices, helped keep allies sweet, while the holding of county governorships and the position of custos rotulorum (plus, after late 1831, of the county lord lieutenancy) gave a more direct influence over existing or potential supporters. As for the colonels of county militias, a disgruntled Rossmore complained to the prime minister Lord Grey in 1831 that ‘the system is notorious, that if he is a candidate, the whole of the staff become employed as the electioneering and fighting agents of their commander’.15 Not only could violence play a part, so too could intimidation, and the threat of eviction or distrainment for non-payment of rent was a very real one. Catholics who became the victims of punitive reprisals, after departing from their landlords’ implicit voting instructions, had to be rescued by financial donations from the Catholic Association. In the extreme case of the 5th Baron Farnham, his promotion of the Second Reformation movement in Cavan, which amounted to a campaign of forcibly converting Catholics, was partly a (probably ineffective) venture in shoring up his electoral interest.

The surviving, but fragmentary, evidence for numbers of freeholders can give the impression of unassailable domination by only one or two interests: Londonderry apparently had a quarter of the registered electors on his side in Down in 1825, and Leinster could supposedly control about half the under 500 registered electors in Kildare in 1831.16 Yet rather more common was the state of affairs in Fermanagh, where the minor interest of Sir Henry Brooke, who several times unsuccessfully contested the county, registered more voters in the seven years to 1819 than either of the sitting Members.17 According to extensive lists of the voting strengths of county Limerick proprietors in the early 1820s, the two principal interests certainly had a clear lead over lesser landlords (in 1820 the 1st Viscount Guillamore and the 2nd earl of Clare together had just over ten per cent of the 8,706 registered electors). But equally striking was the extent to which other electoral interests played a part (with the next 17 largest proprietors claiming just over 30 per cent of the potential number of voters, and the remaining three-fifths of the electorate being in the hands of landlords with fewer than 100 tenants each).18 Assessments made in Galway and Leitrim in 1832 gave a very similar impression of the distribution of landowners’ strength on the registries.19

What these figures show, as both patrons and their lesser supporters recognized, was that a landed interest, if often headed by a conspicuously weighty landowner, was usually a coalition of proprietors, which was necessarily subject to adaptation and compromise over time. In some (often less well documented) cases, alliances between relatively minor landlords could create an interest which was of comparable weight to that belonging to a magnate. Where this interest was specifically motivated by a desire to outweigh an existing stranglehold on the representation, it assumed the form of an independent interest, as in Down and Tipperary, for example.20 ‘Independence’, a commonly self-proclaimed virtue which, as in England, disguised many less disinterested motives, was increasingly a rallying cry resorted to on the hustings. Used to give a candidacy definition and legitimacy, especially in opposition to an outsider, a newcomer or an upstart, it was a convenient platitude, but when employed to promote an alternative to the overt or tacit co-operation of major patrons it could sometimes be turned into a dangerous weapon.

In this period independence stood alongside, and occasionally merged with, another potentially aggressive development, which was the rise of the ‘Catholic interest’ in several counties. This phenomenon, which embraced both small landlords, like the O’Connells in Kerry, and such urban professionals as Thomas Wyse in Waterford, was transformed from being a relatively minor electoral influence into a major campaigning force by the successful policy of capturing votes from the Catholic tenants of Protestant proprietors. The priests, whose ability to sway Catholic voters through a mixture of intoxicating declamation and heavy-handed ex-communications developed rapidly into a stereotype during this period, undoubtedly played a crucial role; after the 1826 election it was commonly said that their ability to intimidate through the threat of religious damnation was at least as powerful as that of a landowner through the menacing of evictions.21 Dr. Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, was one example of a Catholic bishop who threw himself into electioneering affairs, in Carlow and elsewhere. Together, independent Members emerging from the lesser gentry and Catholic Members returned after 1829 may have accounted for up to a third of the county Members elected in this period.

As in the boroughs, there was scarcely a county election when either a newspaper or a private commentator did not speculate on the entry of some candidate or other to oppose the sitting Members. In many of these cases, nothing ever came of it, although sometimes a flutter of excitement arose from a ‘third man’ being put up without his knowledge or consent. Not infrequently, candidates issued an address, conducted an initial canvass or otherwise attempted to gauge the temperature and set down a marker for the future; being in a weak position on the registries or unwilling to risk the expense of a poll were among the customary pretexts for bowing out early. It was not unknown—as in Monaghan in 1820, Roscommon in 1826, Limerick in 1830 and Kildare in 1831—for a coalition of interests to stifle any risk of an impending contest. Occasionally, however, the proceedings in the days leading up to the election, and indeed on the hustings, saw a frantic bout of last minute entrances and exits: Meath and Waterford, largely because of the shilly-shallying of the O’Connellites, witnessed such scenes at the general election of 1830. Stout preparations for a contest sometimes rendered one unnecessary, as O’Connell found when defending his requisite re-election for Clare in July 1829, and his followers’ aggressive conduct in Carlow in 1831 forced Henry Bruen to concede that discretion was the better part of valour by withdrawing on the eve of what would have been an ugly contest.

Much as in the previous period, county contests occurred most often where the number of interests, and the ambition of the patrons who controlled them, were out of alignment with the number of seats available. During the two decades that had elapsed since the Union, there had no doubt been time for further accommodations to take place between prominent patrons, many of whom had been deprived of pocket boroughs in 1801, but this process was far from being entirely resolved. The statistics on contests can be cut any number of ways, but it is a curious fact that between 1820 and 1832, just as between 1801 and 1820, the 13 counties with only one parliamentary borough within their boundaries were contested more often than were the eight counties with two or more boroughs, where there were clearly other outlets for the electoral aspirations of local patrons. (Cork, which altogether accounted for eight Members, and Antrim, which had five, were each only contested once at the county level between 1801 and 1832.) How to explain, however, that these 13 counties also saw a higher rate of contests than the 11 counties which had no boroughs available to act as fallbacks for disappointed county politicians? In fact, the incidence of county contests had much to do with continuing rivalry between electoral patrons, as well as the growing assertiveness of independent and Catholic interests.

 

2

There were 56 contests in the 32 Irish counties in this period, an overall rate of 34 per cent: 47 occurred at general elections (at a rate of 37 per cent) and nine (or 24 per cent) of the 38 by-elections were contested, an average of just over two per Parliament. (The 38 by-elections were caused in 14 cases by the death of the sitting Member, in 11 cases by elevation to the Irish or United Kingdom peerages, in nine cases by appointment to office, in two cases by resignation, in one case by the O’Gorman Mahon being unseated on petition and in another by O’Connell’s refusal to take the oaths.) By comparison with the previous period (taking the statistics back to 1801), this saw an increase in the overall rate of contests from 22 per cent: between 1801 and 1820 there were 36 contests at general elections (at a rate of 23 per cent) and ten (or 19 per cent) of the 52 by-elections were contested, an average of just under two per Parliament. The overall rate of contests rose steeply after the Emancipation and Irish Franchise Acts: it was 23 per cent between 1820 and the end of 1828 (25 per cent at general elections and 17 per cent at by-elections), and doubled to 46 per cent (48 per cent at general elections and 33 per cent at by-elections) between the middle of 1829 and 1832.

The province of Munster, covering the politically important south-west of the country, continued to experience the most contests per county within its borders at each general election (over two), followed in descending order by Connaught in the west, the east-central district of Leinster (including Dublin) and Ulster in the north (each at a rate below two). Connaught (comprising five counties) and Munster (six) each experienced one fewer contest than in the previous period (down from ten to nine in the former and from 14 to 13 in the latter), and both Leinster (12 counties) and Ulster (nine, including Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan) saw a net gain of six contests (up from 14 to 20 in the first and from eight to 14 in the second). Suggestively, the 16 counties to the south of (but including) a line drawn from east to west between Dublin, Westmeath and Galway, experienced the same number of contests (30) as in the previous period, but the other 16 counties saw their number of contests rise from 16 to 26 (of which the four northernmost counties of Antrim, Donegal, Londonderry and Tyrone accounted for only two and three, respectively). So although the south saw some spectacular contests, it may have been the north Midlands which contributed most to the changing pattern of electoral activity.

Compared with the period since the Union, few counties experienced a significantly different number of contests. Of the ten which had been uncontested before 1820, Tyrone was the only one to be uncontested in this period, four had one contest and five had more than one contest (Kilkenny, Louth and Monaghan had two each, and Cavan and Sligo had three each). Of the ten counties contested once in the previous period, two were uncontested in this (Cork and Wicklow), four again had only one contest and four others were contested twice. Two of the four counties contested twice up to 1820 were again twice contested between then and 1832, while the other two counties had one and three contests each. Three of the four counties contested three times in the previous period were contested only twice in this, the other county (Clare) being contested four times. Four counties had been contested four times to the start of this period, but of these only Dublin was again contested four times before the end of it, while Limerick had three contests and the totals for Galway and Leitrim fell to two and one respectively. Overall, eight counties had the same number of contests as in the period 1801-20, nine underwent fewer and fifteen, or just under half, experienced more.

Looking at the counties contested least and most between 1820 and 1832 gives a glimpse of the complexity lying behind these basic figures. Of the three uncontested counties, Cork had a large number of patrons and was nearly contested at least twice, Tyrone had two principal and a few minor landowners and might have seen a poll in 1830, and Wicklow had basically one dominant proprietor and was never in danger of being disturbed. At the other end of the scale, both Clare, which (at least at the start of the period) had two main patrons, and Dublin, which had several, were contested four times. Despite the intrinsic differences between the counties, in both—Dublin in February 1823 and Clare in June 1828—there was one contest which was won by the pro-Catholic movement and three others which were largely the result of squabbling between rival gentry families. The picture in the remaining 27 counties lay somewhere between these extremes, with the third of them which shared the representation between more than two patrons being on balance less likely to be the target of independent or Catholic interests; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, appearing to be less likely, as such independent or pro-Catholic movements would probably have entered the field under the guise of an already existing rival electoral interest in those counties to a greater extent than they did in the two-thirds of counties which had a pair of joint proprietors.

Twelve contests took place in four counties, each of which went to the polls three times. In Cavan and Down, where there was essentially a duopoly controlling the representation, independent candidates twice failed to get elected (and in the former case, there was a religious dimension to the contest in 1826). In Limerick and Sligo, where there were at least three rival interests pursuing the two county seats, there was an independent flavour to the candidacies of reformers at the 1831 election (but, since Limerick was pro-Catholic and Sligo was anti-Catholic, emancipation had no overall influence as an issue). Independent candidacies were also important in causing contests in Mayo and Tipperary, among the 13 counties which polled twice in this period (and which accounted for 26 contests). The Catholic question was a key factor at the 1826 contest in Monaghan, which had several large electoral figures, but of the six twice-contested counties under the thumb of only two interests, four saw major pro-Catholic initiatives in 1826 (Kilkenny, Louth, Waterford and Westmeath) and only Kerry, which returned two pro-Catholic Members throughout, experienced two contests provoked by the ambitions of aristocratic patrons. Of the other seven twice-polled counties, including Monaghan, all of which had three or more patrons, nine of the total of 14 contests were the result of clashes between rival interests and another three were produced by the failed attempts of parliamentary reformers to win seats at the 1831 general election. In the ten counties which were contested only once, two Orangemen attempted to unseat the pro-Catholic sitting Members in Armagh in 1826, two Catholic independents won seats in Carlow and Kildare in 1830, and old-fashioned three-cornered contests occurred in Antrim and Leitrim that year; but in as many as five of these, the least contested, counties, almost all of which had basically two leading patrons, the only contests arose over the predominant issue of reform in 1831.

 

3

At the general election of 1820 it was reported in the press, which also commented extensively on the new election laws, that the sudden dissolution had ‘caught many a worthy gentleman unprepared and will prevent many a contest’. Challenges were menaced in Cork and Wexford, for instance, but only three counties were contested, though they were fought out ‘with great animation’.22 These were Dublin and Limerick, which had each recently been polled four times, plus Queen’s County, where the election was a rerun of the 1818 contest; only in Limerick, where one Whig replaced another, did these result in a change of Member. The three contests (accounting for only nine per cent of the counties) each lasted roughly a week and involved a total of about 14,000 voters; about half of these polled in Limerick, where the totals obtained by the successful candidates were unusually high and the turnout possibly amounted to 80 per cent of the registered electorate.23 Twenty-six counties experienced no alteration in the representation and new Members were returned for just three other counties: Armagh, where a Whig came in for a Tory, and Leitrim, where a Tory came in for a Whig, plus Wexford, where a Tory replaced another Tory. The election therefore resulted in no overall change, with the county representation continuing to be split between 46 Tories (including some rather doubtful supporters of the Liverpool administration) and 18 Whigs (of whom three, including the independent Henry Westenra, were less clearly members of opposition).

In 16 of the county by-elections in the 1820 Parliament (beginning with Louth in August 1820 and ending with Carlow in April 1826), there was a straight partisan exchange, in each case, apart from for the Whig seats in Wicklow and Leitrim, from one Tory to another. In almost all of these there was no change in Members’ attitudes on the Catholic question, except, for instance, that Londonderry’s locum in Down, Mathew Forde, at first proved to be hostile to concessions. The other three by-elections provoked contests, in two of which Catholic campaigners, who had first begun to make an impact in 1807, again had a significant role.24 In a seven-day contest in Sligo in December 1822, when 1,723 freeholders were polled, and in another of the same length in Dublin in February 1823, when 1,843 voted, the Catholics secured two victories. However, since Henry King, the winner in Sligo, divided against Catholic relief in the Commons, the significance of the former result was eclipsed by that of the pro-Catholic Whig Henry White, who replaced an anti-Catholic Tory in a high profile triumph in Dublin. The third contest, which took place in Protestant-dominated Fermanagh in March 1823 (again just under 2,000 polled, this time in a contest of five days’ duration), predictably saw one anti-Catholic Tory defeat another. Yet late the following year, the Whig Member for Limerick borough, Thomas Spring Rice, foretold that the newly established Catholic Association would field candidates widely

and the experiment already tried with success, though with much less power, in Dublin and Sligo, will be repeated generally. Tenants will be brought up against their landlords and the fiery cross, the new party signal, will be sent to the gathering of the 40s. freeholders.25

The Irish secretary Henry Goulburn came to the same conclusion, informing his friend Peel, whose home office remit included Irish affairs, that ‘whenever an election shall take place the people will be placed in opposition to their landlords and such Members only returned as shall please the Association’.26

The formation of the Catholic Association in April 1823, following a reconciliation between O’Connell and Richard Sheil, and the implementation of an amazingly remunerative system of ‘Catholic rent’ the following year, marked key organizational and psychological transformations in the fortunes of the campaign for Catholic relief.27 The Association’s leaders and its ground roots supporters quickly built up a pattern of conspicuous Catholic agitation in at least two-thirds of the counties. This had an explicitly electoral aspect, in that, as in Galway for instance, there were calls for Catholic freeholders to be registered in time for the next general election. In parallel to the development of the Irish movement, the sporadic attempts to introduce the question in Parliament again got nowhere in 1825. Back in 1821, on the last occasion when the Commons had approved a motion for Catholic relief, the momentum had faltered because of the continuing controversy over the ‘veto’ (or the suggestion that the British government be given the right to disapprove of the appointment of Catholic bishops in Ireland). In 1825, when there was again a head of steam in favour of granting Catholic concessions, until Sir Francis Burdett’s bill was thrown out by the Lords, the related question of what was needed in the way of accompanying ‘securities’ focused instead on the status of the Irish 40s. freeholders. In testimony to that session’s select committee on the state of Ireland, a series of commentators, including O’Connell, emphasized how little independence from their landlords this class of tenant voter actually possessed.28 Edward Littleton’s bill to abolish the 40s. freeholders in Ireland, which was abandoned once the main question foundered, had an ambiguous impact on the registration of electors in Irish counties. At first it presumably encouraged a spurt of registrations, because it was originally intended that freeholders who had already registered at the 40s. level would be permitted to continue to vote.29 Later, when the bill was changed, Irish landlords were temporarily deprived of an incentive to keep their registries up to date, since they clearly expected the 40s. freeholders to be disfranchised; in fact, those who neglected to reregister tenants with nearly expired certificates before mid-1825 may have found that their electors were still ‘out’ (or off the registers for the yearlong period of qualification) when they were next needed.

On the dissolution taking place in the summer of 1826, it was immediately apparent that the still unresolved question of emancipation would outweigh all other political concerns and that ‘upon the issue of the approaching general election the fate of the Catholic question may hang. It is a great struggle of the ascendancy on the one side and of the liberal Protestants and all the Catholics on the other’. The electoral activities of the leading Catholics were closely observed, particularly in Waterford, and the liberal press appealed for the return of new Members favourable to the cause. Even as the agitation began to have a tangible outcome, the Dublin Evening Post conceded that ‘we rely more, much more, on the moral effect which the elections in Ireland will produce’, than on any similar results being achieved in English contests; although claiming that ‘the scenes in Waterford, Westmeath, Louth and Armagh would have been enacted through every county in Ireland had there been occasion for it’, it was equally of the opinion that

it is not from the immediate addition of Members ... favourable to the Catholic question that we anticipate much effect, but from the conviction among the mass of the ascendancy aristocracy that political influence cannot be gained, or can be gained [only] with great difficulty, unless they aid the emancipation of their Catholic countrymen.30

This judgement was correct, but proved to be premature.

Thirteen counties (41 per cent of the total) were contested, ten more than at the previous, very quiet, general election. The two most significant contests were those in Waterford, where the Catholic Association first gleefully realized that it had hit upon a winning formula, and Louth, where it struck one of its deadliest blows against the Protestant interest. In the former, in which Henry Villiers Stuart’s victory over Lord George Beresford really owed more to the careful preparations of Wyse than to the national prominence of the Catholic campaign, the influence of the priests and the rebellion of the Catholic tenants produced a spectacular success. In the latter, in which one of the smallest county electorates was under the tightest of landlord control, Sheil ensured a victory for the Association in imitation of Waterford, after the surprise entry of the pro-Catholic independent local gentleman Alexander Dawson. The only other actual gain on the pro-Catholic side was in Leitrim, where Viscount Clements came in instead of his anti-Catholic relation John Clements without a contest. So the number of county Members who favoured Catholic relief rose at this election from 42 to 45, or over twice as many as the anti-Catholics (down from 22 to 19). Of course, the effect of the general election had a greater impact than this negligible alteration in numbers.

In only two contests was there no change of Member, with bitter clashes occurring in Dublin, which already had two pro-Catholic Whigs, and Armagh, where the sitting Whig and his recently converted colleague Charles Brownlow (now beginning to act with opposition as well as to vote for Catholic relief) defeated the staunchly anti-Catholic candidates. New Members were elected after a violent contest for both seats in Westmeath, where Gustavus Rochfort junior replaced his father as a likeminded Orangeman, while the seat formerly filled by the other ministerial Member, Hercules Robert Pakenham, who had also voted for relief in 1825, was narrowly won by the pro-Catholic Whig Hugh Morgan Tuite. As in Waterford and Louth, the religious issue dominated three contests which saw a change of one Member. An Orangeman was ousted in Monaghan, to the delight of the Catholics, but his replacement, Shirley, proved to be hostile to their claims in the Commons. A revolt by about 800 freeholders in Cavan, where Alexander Saunderson was the new entrant, was insufficient to secure the return of either of the pro-Catholic candidates in a fierce contest, following which Farnham’s Catholic tenants were visited with severe reprisals. A Protestant member of the Catholic Association stood unsuccessfully in Kilkenny, in an attempt to open the county, but the nominees of the two patrons (Duncannon replacing his brother on the Bessborough interest) were in any case both pro-Catholics.

Of the five remaining contests, each of which resulted in a change of Member, three saw no change of partisanship: in Down, where the bogus contest was extended to the full two weeks solely so that the new Member (young Lord Castlereagh) would be of age by the close of the poll, and Kerry, where William Hare came in despite his father Lord Ennismore being still considered hostile to Catholic relief, Tories replaced Tories; but in Limerick, where there was again a very high turnout, one inactive Whig replaced another. However, in Tipperary, where Lord Donoughmore’s nephew and heir won the seat with the other sitting Member, despite having 700-800 votes struck off the poll, and in Galway, after Richard Martin was eventually unseated for violence and corruption, opposition could count on two new supporters. These new Members, John Hely Hutchinson I and James Staunton Lambert, together with four others already mentioned (Villiers Stuart, Alexander Dawson, Brownlow and Tuite) made a total of six gains for the Whigs. At least 43,500 freeholders polled in these 13 contests, most of which lasted about a week (though Dublin’s went on for ten days and Galway’s for 14), at an average of about 3,350 per contest, with Galway matching Limerick’s roughly 7,500 as the highest and Down’s artificially small number of about 700 being the lowest; the figures for those voting are known exactly for only four of the contests, and in these the total voterate was 12,326, at an average of just over 3,000, ranging from 2,437 in Kerry to 4,706 in Cavan.

Of the 19 uncontested counties, 13 witnessed no change of sitting Member, Antrim and Clare each saw one Tory substituted for another, and four other counties experienced a (balancing) alteration in partisanship among their new Members (Mayo and Roscommon each returning a Tory instead of a Whig, and Cork and Leitrim each returning a Whig instead of a Tory). Overall, the strength of the Tories among the county Members, which had stood at 45 since the return of Henry White for Dublin in 1823, therefore fell by six to 39, and the opposition, broadly defined, rose by the same margin from 19 to 25. This ratio was unaffected by the unopposed re-elections of the pro-Catholic Tories the knight of Kerry for Kerry in July 1827 and of Viscount Forbes for Longford in March 1828. The return of another Tory, John Boyle, for Cork in December 1827, following Ennismore’s death, nominally increased by one the number of pro-Catholics among the Tories, though a handful of those still hostile to conceding emancipation were eventually to vote for it in 1829.

The implications of the Catholics’ unexpected show of strength was obvious to Lord Donoughmore, who reflected in July 1826 that ‘hereafter, no man will have a quiet election in an Irish county who does not support them’, as well as to British observers on both sides of the party divide.31 The Scottish Whig James Abercromby, who witnessed the Irish elections at first hand, reported to Henry Brougham, 12 July, that ‘this is a sort of little bloodless revolution. The political power of the state has passed from the landed aristocracy, the natural supporters, into the hands of the Catholic priests, the natural enemies of the government’. On the 23rd he commented that ‘there is not a moment to be lost: if another election should occur before a real and rational effort is made to settle this question, the power of the priests will be confirmed to an extent that will render any national settlement quite hopeless and impracticable’.32 In November 1826 John Leslie Foster urged Peel to raise the Irish county franchise to £20, since, if emancipation were granted, ‘you would have at least 60 Catholic Members, and such Catholics! Sheil for Louth and O’Connell for any southern county he might choose’. Even at this point Peel apparently began to contemplate the unthinkable; at least he commented in reply that he would, if concession became inevitable, at the same time attempt to protect the security of the Protestant church.33

The Catholic Association and its leaders continued to build on their success, raising a new Catholic rent to support rebellious freeholders, threatening ministerial supporters with opposition at future elections unless the government conceded emancipation, and beginning to set up county Liberal Clubs (on Wyse’s Waterford model) as a way of encouraging and controlling the registration of Catholic electors. However, it was not until the breathtaking entry of a Catholic candidate, in the person of O’Connell himself, at the Clare by-election in July 1828, and the achievement of his astonishing victory, which, like in Waterford, was obtained by inciting the 40s. freeholders to revolt while at the same time maintaining an atmosphere of complete calm on the hustings (where just over 3,000 were polled in a couple of days), that emancipation came within their grasp. In the aftermath of the Clare election, the number of Liberal Clubs, many of them relaunched as Independent Clubs, grew dramatically, and extended to about two-thirds of the counties. The increasingly desperate Protestant gentry retaliated by forming Brunswick Clubs to rally support for the existing constitutional arrangements in church and state; they appeared in almost all counties (Kilkenny and Meath were notable exceptions) and were especially strongly represented, as was to be expected, in Ulster.34 The exceptionally grave risk of unrest in the autumn of 1828 was one factor in the government’s decision to grant emancipation early the following year. Yet what most struck home to the prime minister, the duke of Wellington, at that time was the hopeless stalemate which meant that

the king cannot confer the honour of a peerage upon an Irish gentleman, a Member of Parliament for an Irish county [James Daly’s ennoblement was postponed because of the risk of another such result in county Galway] ... His Majesty cannot appoint a Member of an Irish county to an office [it was the appointment of Vesey Fitzgerald, the defeated candidate in Clare, to the board of trade that had caused the by-election in the first place]; and still less can he dissolve his Parliament.35

He might have added, what was surely in his mind, that with George IV’s health giving way, there was every danger of the monarch’s death precipitating a general election.

 

4

The Irish Franchise Act of 1829, which accompanied emancipation and was the only major ‘security’ eventually required for it, marked such a significant watershed in the size of the county electorate that its impact needs to be considered in detail here.36 The raising of the franchise had been under consideration since at least the previous summer and on 12 Dec. 1828 Peel, grappling with a subject which he found ‘so extensive and so important that there is no end to the considerations which it involves’, sought further advice from one of his Irish experts, John Leslie Foster; he, replying on the 16th, delivered himself of a dissertation.37 Still a Protestant alarmist, though relieved to know that the 40s. franchise was to be abolished, Foster again pressed for a minimum £20 qualification in order to create a far less dominant Catholic electorate (in at least 13 counties, including those in Ulster, and possibly in as many as 25, the Protestants, he calculated, would be in a majority) and one which was much smaller and so more easily controlled (‘It is really the number of offenders which constitutes their impunity’). Admitting that the existing £50 and £20 freeholders were temporarily disaffected politically, he nevertheless saw in them the possibility of salvation, at the expense of the Catholic peasantry:

The tendencies of the law prior to the rebellion of the freeholders were to enable a few great proprietors to nominate the county Members ... The gentry and such of the yeomanry who were independent were almost powerless except by attaching themselves once for all to the great interests ... A new system of the nature we have been discussing would transfer much of the real power formerly exercised by the great proprietors to the minor gentry, the [Protestant] clergy, and the more opulent farmers. But if this be an evil, the question is, can we help it? The influence of the aristocracy is annihilated. The [Catholic] priests and the demagogues are in their place. The practical question seems to be whether we should not now aim at placing the power in the hands of that middle class as the best course within our reach. The minor gentry of Ireland are essentially Tory rather than Whig. Very little of what is radical enters into their composition. They are also essentially Protestant. I should think that the government would have no reason to be dissatisfied with the representatives which this interest would return. They would be of much the same description as those returned at present; they might comprise fewer absentees and more men of business. I think they would contain almost none who would found their claims on the loudness of their advocacy of the Catholics.

Foster ruled out one suggested scheme, that of linking the franchise to the payment of a local tax (on an analogy with the English freeholders’ liability to pay the land tax), condemned the most objectionable type of voter created under the 1820 Election Act, and held out for a much higher franchise on the ground that ‘most of the present 40s. freeholders would swear to a freehold of £5, and the worst portion of them would swear even to £10’, so destroying the purpose of the measure. He did not get his own way, but his insights into the future electorate were not to be prove entirely inaccurate.

Peel’s franchise bill in the end proposed raising the qualification to only £10 (as in 1825), which was already a considerable hike compared to the minimum level in England. In the Commons it received little opposition, most speakers welcoming it as an essential counterpart to emancipation, though Duncannon put up a token defence of the freeholders, 19 and 20 May (dividing minorities of only 17 and 20 against it), and the Tory George Moore’s attempt to raise the level to £20 was defeated (by 112-16), 26 May 1829. It was left to Rice to object that day to a key feature of the eventual Franchise Act (10 Geo. IV, c. 8) which replaced the ‘beneficial interest’ test with the so-called ‘solvent tenant’ test. As he stated to the House, in determining whether an elector was qualified

first, we have to establish the existence of £10 profit in the hands of the lessee, and then you call on the freeholder to prove that a responsible and solvent tenant could afford to pay £10 a year over and above that ... You are not here contemplating a £10 freehold—you go infinitely beyond it, quite as far as some honourable gentlemen are desirous of going.

As he implied, this was practically the equivalent of establishing a £20 qualification on the basis of the old ‘beneficial interest’ interpretation. The introduction of the much tighter ‘solvent tenant’ test, which was strictly applied by assistant barristers in Irish counties, had the effect of lowering the size of the electorate more than would otherwise have been the case.

To measure the effect of the Act in reducing the county electorate, it is first necessary to establish its size on the eve of emancipation. Wyse, who reproduced the figures contained in a parliamentary return of 1825 in his contemporary account of the Catholic Association, was sceptical of their value, since ‘it does not appear ... that they afford an accurate view of the real state of the constituency’.38 As he noticed, the information sent in by the clerks of the peace revealed that the totals were based on inaccurate and inconsistent record keeping. The table for Down showed that the official had simply added up the number of new registrations in the previous eight years, so clearly failing to take account of those who had died or moved to different freeholds (and reregistered at a different location). Nearly half the Kilkenny electorate were included as £50 freeholders, even though their dates of registration extended back not just to 1817, but as far as 1785. The more discerning official in Dublin estimated the number of £50 freeholders in his county at 200 less than the recorded total of 800, as ‘many of these persons have died since registering or parted with their freeholds or, from the fall of times, have become so reduced in value as to preclude many of them from voting’. He was also honest enough to state, in relation to the 2,947 registered 40s. freeholders, that although ‘the precise number ... is impossible to ascertain’, about 800 were renewals undertaken ‘within the last two years by the respective chief landlords of the county, for the purpose of keeping up the tenantry duly registered to meet future elections’. Clearly, a well-informed and scrupulous official, who was lucky enough to have responsibility for a relatively low county electorate, might have a shrewd idea how many of the apparently still valid registrations were in fact expired or duplicate entries. In uncontested counties where the figure for the electorate was anomalously high, possibly only as the cosmic fallout from some long past electoral collision or because of preparations for some as yet unlaunched political adventure, it was obviously impossible to make an accurate guess as to the real number of potential voters.

Nevertheless, based on 30 complete returns (Donegal’s was missing and Louth’s did not list the 40s. voters separately), in 1825 there were 228,636 registered county electors, an average of 7,621 per county, of which 199,824 or 87 per cent were 40s. freeholders. This represented an increase of about a quarter since 1815, with no change in the proportion of those qualified at the lowest level. The parliamentary returns for 1 Jan. 1829, compiled from figures submitted from all 32 counties, showed that the total registered county electorate had fallen slightly to 216,791, an average of 6,775 per county, but with the 191,616 40s. freeholders still accounting for 88 per cent of the total.39 These statistics (reproduced in the table of Irish counties in appendix V and at the head of the constituency articles), which are relied on here in default of any better, varied widely from county to county. The five highest electorates, each with over 9,000 registered voters, were Galway and Mayo (with the stratospheric figures of 33,014 and 24,417 respectively), followed by Monaghan, Down and Limerick. The bottom five, each with under 2,000 electors, were Meath, Longford, Carlow, Wicklow and tiny Kildare (with only 952). Thirteen counties had a higher than average proportion of 40s. freeholders (in Galway, Mayo, Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal this was as much as 97 per cent), and of the 19 counties with a lower than average proportion, six (Dublin, Queen’s, King’s, Cork, Kildare and Meath) had less than or equal to 62 per cent.

By the time the following year’s figures were taken on 1 Jan. 1830, the Franchise Act had come into force and the total registered county electorate had fallen by 82 per cent to 39,772, an average of 1,243 per county.40 This decline to a fifth of its former size nevertheless meant that after all the 40s. freeholders had been removed from the registries, the roughly 25,000 £20 and £50 freeholders (they were not required to reregister, but clearly some were removed from the registers at this point and were replaced by a similar number of others who qualified at these higher rates, making no significant overall change) were joined by about 15,000 new £10 freeholders, almost all of whom had presumably been qualified at the 40s. rate up to this time.41 Excluding Limerick (for which no breakdown by level of qualification was submitted), there were an average of 381 £10 voters per county. Assuming that in Limerick the split between the £10 electors and the rest of the county’s voters was in the same proportion as in the rest of Ireland, namely about one-third to two-thirds, then there were an estimated 13,000 £10 registered freeholders in all.42

Ten counties had more than the average number of registered electors, with two (Limerick and Cork) having more than 3,000 and three (Tipperary, Galway and Antrim) having more than 2,000. Thirteen of the 16 counties with lower than the average county electorate had fewer than 1,000 freeholders, including Kildare (on 496) and Longford (on 367) with under 500. In half the counties the percentage of £10 freeholders in the electorate was in the range from 30 per cent (the figure in Cavan) to 55 per cent (the figure in Monaghan). The four with the highest proportions of £10 electors were Londonderry, Tyrone and Armagh (between 62 and 69 per cent) plus Donegal (an amazing 85 per cent), perhaps suggesting a relative inability or reluctance among freeholders to qualify at the higher levels; Ulster was the province with the highest proportion of £10 freeholders within the electorate (54 per cent), followed (on 45 per cent) by Connaught, which now had only half the total number of electors as each of the other provinces.43 In 11 counties the proportion of £10 freeholders was under 20 per cent, with Meath, Kildare and Dublin producing rates of just eight, five and three per cent respectively. These particular counties, being close to the capital and among the wealthiest in the country, would have had a much higher proportion of freeholders able and willing to qualify at the higher rates.

The collective totals and averages disguise the wide range of different experiences that counties underwent as a result of the Franchise Act. In five counties (Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Monaghan and Leitrim), a group which included the top three in terms of size in 1829, the electorate shrank to under ten per cent of its former size. A total of 24, including these five, had electorates reduced to under a third of their previous size or, in the cases of Kilkenny, Limerick and Tipperary, to almost exactly a third. Apart from Carlow (reduced to 35 per cent) and Dublin (to 41 per cent), the remaining counties (Queen’s, Kildare, King’s, Cork, Meath and Wicklow) fell to more than half their former size, although in Wicklow’s case it actually represented over two-thirds of it (69 per cent). Some of the differences in these relative reductions were the result of the extremely high or low levels of registered electors seen in some counties up to 1829: for instance, Galway’s overinflated number of 40s. freeholders accounts for its relatively large proportional fall. But (as between 1825 and 1829, and again between 1830 and 1832) there were considerable changes in the ranking order of the sizes of county electorates between 1829 and 1830. Galway, Down, Limerick, Tipperary and Clare remained in the top quartile of counties (with Armagh just moving out of the top eight in 1830), and Kildare, Carlow, Longford and Donegal stayed in the bottom quartile (with Westmeath just moving into the bottom eight in 1830), but only four others hardly changed places at all (Wexford went from 14th to 16th, Londonderry from 19th to 21st, Kerry from 20th to 19th and Louth from 23rd to 24th). Seventeen other counties moved at least four places up or down the ranking order, the biggest falls being in Mayo (2nd to 17th place), Roscommon (9th to 27th) and Leitrim (13th to 29th), and the largest rises being in King’s (27th to 14th), Queen’s (26th to 12th), Dublin (21st to 7th) and Cork (17th to 2nd).

The effect of the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders sometimes had a disproportionate impact on electoral politics within a county. For instance, Hertford believed it would destroy his interest in Antrim, where he had scarcely any £10 freeholders, and the son and namesake of the late Member Charles O’Hara thought it had caused the family interest to collapse in Sligo.44 According to a list of the leading proprietors in Armagh, the top four landlords retained much the same proportion of tenant electors immediately after the Franchise Act as they had before, but one of the sitting Members, Brownlow, felt that he had fallen significantly behind in relation to the others.45 Quick work by the Beresfords helped them maintain a dominating position in Londonderry, even though the fact that the head of the interest, the 3rd marquess of Waterford, was under age meant that they could not grant new leases to boost their tenant strength until 1832; yet their Londonderry borough Member Sir George Hill’s analysis showed that the numerous minor interests now played a relatively greater role.46 In Fermanagh, Lord Enniskillen could boast that, unlike his rivals, he had never split his freeholds in order to create 40s. freeholders and so escaped lightly from the franchise changes, while in Meath the 2nd Baron Langford, who had had not one single 40s. voter, hoped that his bolstered ‘elective power’ would enable him to restore his family’s control over one seat.47 In Leitrim, Roscommon and Wexford it was observed that the smaller Protestant interests were those which had benefited the most from the change, and this development must have contributed to the strength of ‘independent’ interests in other counties too.

As well as disproportionately depriving Catholic electors of the vote (for instance, Protestant freeholders and clergyman had a 5:2 majority in county Longford, according to a report made at the time of the 1831 election), it may also have affected Catholic interests for the worse.48 Somewhat to the surprise of contemporaries, including Catholic agitators like Sheil, there was very little popular hostility to the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders in the counties, even in such places as Clare, Tipperary and Waterford.49 Charles Grey reported to this father Earl Grey from Limerick, 4 Aug. 1829, that

I have enquired of numbers of the people how they liked losing their votes. Most said they were glad, as they would not now have the priest and landlord driving them different ways; others did not care about it, and a few said they should like still to be able to give Dan a vote.50

Under the Franchise Act, special sessions were to be held in all counties, at which those registering before the assistant barristers would neither have to pay the fee which would thereafter apply (of 2s. 6d., at quarter sessions), nor be required to wait (the shortened pre-qualification period of) six months before being allowed to cast their votes. One liberal Dublin paper warned that failure to register in large numbers ‘would, in case of a sudden election, put every county in Ireland into the pockets of the aristocracy’, but reported that the sessions in June produced a very low take-up; for example, in Tipperary 2,285 notices were served by potential electors (or by electoral agents, perhaps), but only 465 attended the sessions and only 179 were actually registered.51 Wyse, who condemned the Franchise Act that year on the ground that the ‘counties have become boroughs and the constituency a corporation’, noted that of the few notices sent in ‘not more than one third, and in some places nor more than one fifth, have been accepted’.52

One cause of this widespread apathy was that in mid-1829 a general election was still possibly three or four years off. How quickly individual interests and, indeed, county electorates rose after the measure came into force partly depended on how soon a by-election was expected. This probably accounts for the speed with which Downshire registered his tenants in Down, where a contest had originally been expected on Castlereagh’s seeking re-election after his appointment to the admiralty board in July. It was equally likely that the still unusually large electorate, compared to the 1829 level, in Wicklow was brought about as a means of warding off any challenge to the amicable substitution of one Member for another on the same coalition of family interests there. Certainly, this was the case in Clare, the only county in Munster to see a large and immediate registration of £10 freeholders, since O’Connell’s supporters reckoned that his re-election, after his refusal to take the oaths, would need to be fought as strongly as his victory had been the previous year.53 In February 1830, without there having been much risk of a contest, Killeen came in for Meath as the first Catholic (after O’Connell) to be seated in Ireland.

 

5

Resuming the chronological survey of county contests, the death of the ailing Thomas Lloyd in December 1829 created expectations of a severe battle in Limerick long before the by-election started on 25 Jan. 1830. Engaged in what he thought would be an old fashioned fight on the basis of territorial interests against a Tory patron (Kingston) whose share of the tenant voting strength had risen with the recent electoral changes, the former Whig Member Standish O’Grady complained to Lord Anglesey, the lord lieutenant, that

as this election is the first that has taken place in Ireland since the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders, and as it is looked to as a criterion by which to try the effect that measure is likely to have in other counties, there is a strong effort making at the popular side to prove that the £10 and £20 freeholders are still more independent of their landlords than their predecessors were and the Roman Catholic clergy are stirring themselves to that end.54

Just over 1,500 voters, or perhaps about half the registered electorate, polled during the violent week-long contest. The victory for the Catholic activists was short-lived, since O’Grady was unseated on petition, but he came in again unopposed soon afterwards. The completely unexpected retirement of Villiers Stuart, whose own interest had been crippled by the Franchise Act, led to speculation about another contest along sectarian lines in Waterford a month later.55 There was a six-day poll, in which nearly 800 or possibly as much as about two thirds of the registered electorate voted, but as Lord George Beresford had reached a controversial compromise with O’Connell and Sheil, he easily defeated a Catholic opponent, John Barron. The knight of Kerry, appointed vice-treasurer of Ireland, was not opposed for Kerry on his re-election in April 1830 but, unlike O’Grady and Beresford, he did have to undergo a contest at the general election that summer.

In mid-1830 it was predicted that there would be many contests, not least because the issue of increased Irish taxation had raised the temperature in many counties.56 Over half of them (18, or 56 per cent) were contested, an increase of five over the previous general election, and all the provinces except Munster (which had one less than in 1826) experienced more contests (including Connaught whose total rose from one to four, out of its five counties). In four contested counties (Carlow, Cavan, Down and Fermanagh), in most of which the defeated candidate was an independent, there was no change of Member, though Saunderson, who had been challenged by another Tory in Cavan, soon proved to be a reformer. In Wexford, one of two counties in which both Members changed, a Whig and a Tory replaced the now retired Members of the same party complexions, after a contest against a Catholic Whig, Henry Lambert. However, in Clare, O’Connell’s seat was won not by his son Maurice, but by his estranged friend and fellow Repealer the O’Gorman Mahon, and a Whig, Macnamara, replaced the Tory Lucius O’Brien as the other Member.

In six of the 12 counties which saw one change of Member, there was no alteration of party profile: in Louth, where Sheil and another Catholic candidate disastrously split the opposition vote and so let in John McClintock, and in Sligo, where an independent vainly challenged Edward Cooper junior, whose father died during the election, Tories replaced Tories; in Dublin, where Lord Brabazon stood after the retirement of Richard Wogan Talbot, and Westmeath, where Chapman saw off the sitting Member Tuite, new Whig candidates came in; and in Kildare and Tipperary the Catholics Richard More O’Ferrall and Sheil came in, with the respective assistance of the Leinster and Dunalley interests, in place of Tories. The change of individual Member caused an alteration in partisan representation in another six contests. The struggle between the two branches of the Clements family resulted in the Tory John Clements returning to the House for Leitrim, while a realignment of electoral connections in Monaghan saw Westenra defeated by Lord Blayney, another Tory. In Kerry, where the opposition came from the son of a former Whig Member after the Tory Lord Ennismore had withdrawn, and in Galway, where the sitting Tory Daly was beaten, the Catholic Whigs William Browne and Sir John Burke were the new Members. After sitting Tories had retired, the established opposition Whigs Lord Belfast and Dominick Browne came in for Antrim and Mayo, after contests against the representatives (both named McDonnell) of minor and independent interests; their colleagues John O’Neill and James Browne apparently both trimmed their wings in due course to vote with the incoming Grey administration.

In these 18 contests (which took between two and seven days each), the total number of electors voting was about 14,800,57 which was roughly the number who had polled in three counties in 1820 and only a third of the total polled in 13 contests in 1826. In five counties (Fermanagh, Tipperary, Clare, Antrim and Galway) there were at least 1,000 voters, and Down polled just over 1,500, while at the other end of the scale there were three counties (Kildare, Carlow and Leitrim) with under 500 freeholders voting and three more (Sligo, Westmeath and Kerry) with only just over 500. An average of 820 freeholders were polled in each county, which, based on the 1830 figures for the size of county electorates, amounted to an average turnout of 66 per cent; bearing in mind that not all of those recently registered would yet have been eligible to vote and that the totals for county electorates and voterates were in any case sometimes suspect, this was nonetheless an interesting and probably quite an accurate result. Apart from the extreme cases of the lowest turnout (38 per cent in Tipperary) and an improbable highest turnout (98 per cent in Fermanagh), the variation in the rest of the counties contested (between 53 per cent in Dublin and Kerry at the bottom of the range, and 84 per cent in Sligo) seems plausible enough.

Five of the 14 uncontested counties returned the same Members again, although Lord Mount Charles (Donegal) and Thomas Bernard and Lord Oxmantown (King’s) appear to have reluctantly gone over to the reforming Grey government in the following session. The only county to change both its Members was Londonderry, where two anti-Catholic Tories replaced two pro-Catholic Tories. No party change occurred in two of the eight counties which elected a new Member: a Tory replaced a Tory in Longford, and a Whig succeeded a Whig in Armagh. Of the other six counties, Tyrone returned a Tory instead of a Whig, and O’Connell elbowed out another Whig in Waterford, but, with no rival candidates in the end persisting, opposition made gains at the expense of ministerialists in Cork, Kilkenny, Roscommon and Limerick, where O’Grady regained the seat he had lost earlier in the year (and Richard Hobart Fitzgibbon soon changed tack to back the Grey ministry).

The outcome of all these changes was that the number of Members broadly in support of the Wellington administration, which had fallen by one on the election of O’Connell (the return of Killeen, an Irish Whig, balancing out that of the Tory Beresford at other by-elections) before the general election, fell (from 38) to 25. The Whigs made a net gain of 12 to raise their total from 25 to 37, counting O’Connell and the O’Gorman Mahon separately as Irish Repealers. In terms of the county Members, the effect of the 1830 election was, therefore, to reverse the balance of power between these two broad political forces, even if the Irish Members cannot always be neatly categorized using English party labels. The Dublin Evening Post, as well as crediting opposition successes to the campaign against higher taxes and the impact of the recent French revolution, claimed that ‘no man is sure of his seat’ and cited the example of Sir Marcus Somerville, who ‘escaped by a miracle in Meath and, in order to avoid a contest, was obliged to swallow tests that would choke an aristocratic candidate only two years ago’. The newspaper attributed this development to the Franchise Act in that

there really is raising up in Ireland a sturdy and discontented yeomanry, who will not be at the beck of their landlords, as the poor forty shillingers were (except upon great occasions), and who will teach them (the landlords) that the only chance they have of retaining any influence will be by going with the current of the popular mind.58

Radical opinion in England was of much the same view, one publication not only lauding the independence of the newly respectable Irish county electorate, but even crediting O’Connell with being able to return ‘nearly half the Members for Ireland’ through his agitation for the repeal of the Union.59 The three by-elections that occurred during the short 1830 Parliament did not alter the overall state of affairs. On being appointed junior ministers in the Grey ministry, Duncannon was re-elected for Kilkenny, after a spoiling challenge from an O’Connellite had provoked a contest (in which 605 freeholders voted), and Parnell was returned unopposed for Queen’s, while Daniel’s son and apprentice Maurice O’Connell won Clare (with 502 freeholders being polled) after the O’Gorman Mahon had been unseated on petition.

However, at the general election of 1831, during which the repeal question was eclipsed by the overwhelming importance of the issue of parliamentary reform, more gains were expected for the Irish Whigs and O’Connellites, including in Ulster.60 There were 13 contests (covering 41 per cent of the counties), a fall of five since the previous year and a return to the level experienced in 1826. Eight contested counties returned the same sitting Members, with reformers being defeated in Down, King’s, Londonderry and Longford, and also in Queen’s, where one of the surviving Members was only lukewarm in his attitude to the bill but the other came out strongly in its favour; in contrast, Tories were beaten in Clare, Meath and Roscommon. In Donegal, the resignation of both vaguely pro-reform Members allowed two Tory anti-reformers to defeat two reformers, and in Cavan and Sligo, each of which elected one new Member, Tories who had voted for the reform bill (Saunderson, who withdrew, and Henry King, who stood a poll alongside an unsuccessful reform candidate) were replaced by two anti-reformers. In the two other contests which caused a change of Member, one Whig came in for another in Mayo, after another independent challenge failed, and Henry Lambert defeated the anti-reformer Lord Valentia in a fearful struggle in Wexford. On balance, these contests made no difference to the partisan attitudes of the Members returned.

At least 11,200 freeholders polled in the 13 contests (which lasted for about four days each, on average), though accurate figures for the total number of voters are usually lacking. This represented an average of about 860 voters per county, or roughly what it had been at the previous general election, when nearly a third more counties had gone to the polls. The highest voterate was in Down (2,016), but Clare must have seen at least 1,400 polled; the lowest was in Longford (about 330), though in Donegal, King’s, Mayo, Meath, Sligo and Wexford probably at least 600 electors actually voted. According to a parliamentary return, by 1 May 1831 there were 52,162 registered county electors, of whom 20,109 or 39 per cent were £10 freeholders, giving an average county electorate of 1,630, including 628 £10 voters.61 On the basis of these figures, which are too high since some electors would not yet have been qualified to poll, the turnout in the 13 contested counties would have been about 59 per cent. Using these calculations, the turnout in individual counties varied between a low of 42 per cent in Queen’s and a high of 78 per cent in Clare.

In 11 of the 19 uncontested counties there were no changes in the Members returned, and in Fermanagh, where a Tory replaced another, and in Kildare and Tipperary, where Whigs came in for Whigs, there was no partisan alteration either. However, reform candidates of diverse hues replaced Tories in Carlow (Walter Blackney and Sir John Doyle for Bruen and Kavanagh), Kerry (Daniel O’Connell for the knight of Kerry), Louth (Sheil for McClintock), Monaghan (Westenra for Shirley) and Waterford (Robert Power for Beresford); in Kerry and Waterford the other Member also changed, but in both cases another reformer was brought in. Overall, this meant that the number of Tories or anti-reformers fell from 25 to 19 among the county Members, and that the Whig ministerialists and Irish liberals made a net gain of six, so rising in total from 37 to 43, to which the two O’Connells should be added to reach a figure of 45 reformers. Four of the five by-elections that occurred during the 1831 Parliament witnessed the unopposed replacement of one reformer with another, while the death of the Tory Somerville led to a contest in Meath in August 1831, when Henry Grattan II defeated another reformer in a one-day poll (during which 459 or approximately 37 per cent of the electors voted). This brought the ratio of anti- to pro-reformers to 18-46, the exact reverse of the balance of Tories and Whigs at the start of this period. After the general election of 1820 half the counties returned two Tories, but by the dissolution in 1832 this had fallen to only seven (Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Longford, Sligo and Tyrone), most of which were in Ulster. By contrast, the number of counties returning a Tory in tandem with a Whig had dropped from 14 to only four (Down, Leitrim, Monaghan and Westmeath) and the only entirely Whig counties of Kildare and Wicklow in 1820 had been joined by 16 others returning two reformers by the time the Reform Acts were passed.

 

6

Few participants in county elections had the insouciance of the third man in Tipperary in 1820, who blithely suggested that the outcome of the election be placed in the hands of the candidates’ proposers and seconders, with the sheriff having a casting vote, or the commitment of the Catholic priest from Monaghan, who called his residence ‘Election Hill’ in the aftermath of the 1826 contest there. There was nothing quite like the raucous atmosphere of an Irish county election, Galway being an exemplar in this respect, in that it combined the protracted and legally vulnerable process of voting with the communal excesses of a barely licensed period of feasting and celebration. Squibs, musical performances, vocal and physical provocations, and unfettered expressions of partisan or sectarian affiliations all contributed to the jollification, which could easily descend from genteel self-restraint into drunken disorder. Even well-respected candidates could be given a hard time on the hustings, where special opprobrium was reserved for inactive or non-resident Members (though most county Members had a residence or a family connection with the county or one of its immediate neighbours). About half the counties witnessed violent proceedings at one or more of the elections during this period, Carlow being badly disturbed on at least three occasions. Sometimes the candidates were the target, and James Massy Dawson was the victim of a potentially murderous attack at the Limerick by-election in early 1830. Westenra was injured in a duel that was provoked by a quarrel over the cause of the rioting that marred the Monaghan election in 1826, and the Clare Members and their adherents were prone to issuing each other with challenges. At least a dozen deaths took place at the bitter general election of 1826, with one in Monaghan, at least one and probably more in Galway, five in Mayo and another five (or, by some accounts 26) in Kerry, where, as in Louth, the military had to be mustered to restore order.

Many more threats of petitions against a return were made at the end of county contests than ever reached the Commons, as the comparative complexity and cost of starting such procedures must later have put off many who angrily threatened retribution during the throes of defeat. In six counties there was at least one petition following an election and in another seven there was at least one petition following two elections in this period. In some of these cases, as those relating to Kerry and Monaghan in 1826, the petition was allowed to lapse, while others made no headway, including one against the return of Henry King for Sligo in 1822, the discharge of which by the House was made a ground of complaint in a subsequent petition. Among the major concerns raised in these petitions were the loss of voting records incurred in Tipperary in 1830 and the allegation of false imprisonment (against electors hoping to vote for the rival candidate) in Wexford in 1831. The outcomes of the Galway and Mayo elections in 1830 were confirmed by committees, despite the allegations of bribery and intimidation that were raised; intimidation at the hands of Orangemen was one charge included in the petition following the 1824 Cavan by-election, but it was the interference of the Catholic priests that was most often cited in this respect, including in the petitions against the returns from Dublin, Waterford and Westmeath in 1826. The return of O’Connell for Clare in July 1828 was confirmed by the Commons the following year, although he was still sent back for re-election for refusing to take the oaths. It was in Clare that the only example occurred in this period of a county election being voided, when the return of the O’Gorman Mahon for the second seat in 1830 was overturned. Committees only twice replaced sitting Members with defeated candidates: following the 1826 Galway contest Martin was unseated to the advantage of James Lambert, and after the Limerick by-election in March 1830 O’Grady was unseated to the advantage of Massy Dawson.

As well as distributing handfuls of silver during chairings, as in Carlow, or subscribing to local charities, as in Wexford, county candidates had to settle sheriffs’ expenses that might amount to over £1,000. According to the surviving evidence, expenses of about £1-2,000 per candidate per election were quite common, occurring at this level in Antrim in 1831, Armagh in 1826, Clare in 1830 and early 1831 (for the O’Briens), Down in 1831, Londonderry in 1830 and 1831, Tipperary in 1831 and Waterford in 1826. Tory funds contributed sums of about this size to candidates standing in Cavan, Longford and Sligo in 1831, and freeholders put up just over £2,000 in Louth in 1826 and in Longford in 1830 in support of independent challengers. £5,000 was the figure mentioned by Westenra as necessary for the unseating of a rival in Monaghan in 1820, and this amount was reportedly what it cost Lord Clanricarde to back Lambert in Galway in 1826, while in Tipperary the likely outgoings for such a proceeding were reckoned to be £14-15,000 in 1820 and about £5-10,000 in 1826. The opponents of O’Connell collected £4,500 to finance Vesey Fitzgerald’s re-election in 1828, but the Catholic Association’s donation of £8,000 to O’Connell helped secure his return. Macnamara and the O’Gorman Mahon had joint costs of at least £6,800 at the 1830 Clare election, though the former complained that his share was only £1,000 and the latter probably indebted himself for far more than the balance. Some huge expenditures were incurred by individuals, including Rossmore, who claimed to have paid out £20,000 during two contests in Monaghan and one in King’s. The losing candidate Sir Compton Domvile apparently spent over £17,000 in Dublin in 1823, and it cost Lord George Beresford about £15,000 to regain his seat in Waterford in early 1830, when the two candidates in the Limerick by-election were said to have incurred total costs of £30,000. Dominick Browne put at £30,000 the total sum that he had spent on elections in Mayo, and the victory in Waterford in 1826 may eventually have cost Villiers Stuart about the same amount.

The extent of government influence, which may have involved secret cash payments, is necessarily hard to judge given that it was exercised in large part through patronage and personal persuasion. The Liverpool government would, of course, have given its backing to ministers such as William Wellesley Pole, the master of the mint, in Queen’s in 1820, and it presumably favoured all those whom it considered to be its supporters in the Commons, even those like Fitzgibbon, whose voting record and general attitude up to 1820 did not quite justify giving him its unequivocal blessing. The task of managing the Irish elections fell to the Irish secretary, and much the best information on this subject is contained in the letterbooks of Lord Francis Leveson Gower, who held the post during the 1830 general election. In at least a third of the counties, his correspondence shows that ministers expressed a clear preference as to which candidates should receive the endorsement of the government, and their wishes evidently bore fruit in Antrim, Down, Dublin, Longford, Louth, Meath and Wexford. As Leveson Gower made clear, when explaining the official endorsement of Lord Bingham, who was not in the end returned, in Mayo:

The present government has received a steady support, unpurchased by any favours that I know of, from Bingham, and we should therefore depart from all the usual principle and practice of all administrations if we should not endeavour to secure his re-election by any legitimate means at our disposal.62

The role that the reform ministry took in 1831 in, for instance, Carlow, Louth, Meath and Wexford, suggests that it interpreted its powers in exactly the same way.

 

The Boroughs

1

Irish peers played a major role in the return of the Members who sat for the 33 Irish boroughs, all of which, apart from Cork and Dublin, were single Member constituencies.63 Often this influence was exercised as part of a larger county interest, particularly where the politics of the county town, if it was a parliamentary borough, were intimately connected to those of the shire in which it lay, as was the case in Galway. The most notable example of borough patronage was that possessed by the Beresford family, which had an interest in the boroughs of Waterford in county Waterford, and Coleraine and Londonderry in county Londonderry (as well as, from the 1826 election, the borough of Armagh, which was in the gift of the 2nd marquess of Waterford’s brother, Lord John George de la Poer Beresford, as primate of Ireland). Of the peers who had a stake in more than one borough, Donegall, who was a landowner in Antrim, controlled Belfast borough and disputed Carrickfergus with Downshire, who, as a county Down magnate, also laid claim to influencing the return of the Member for Downpatrick. This last borough had once been firmly under the thumb of an English peer, the 21st Baron (de) Clifford, who managed to cling on to Kinsale until the end of this period. As already indicated, Devonshire had varying degrees of influence in Bandon Bridge, Dungarvan and Youghal, and the marquesses of Hertford held sway in Lisburn. Other English patrons were William Stuart, archbishop of Armagh until his death in 1822, and Sir Edward Chomeley Dering, who inherited an interest in Wexford to add to his two seats at New Romney.

Many borough patrons, whether peers or not, possessed only a small electoral interest, which was often neither total nor fully secure. The 2nd Viscount Northland (later 1st earl of Ranfurly) and the 12th Viscount (later 1st earl of) Kilmorey contented themselves with exercising dominating interests in Dungannon and Newry, but did not seek to gain a significant say in counties Tyrone and Down, respectively. In a few cases, sometimes as an arrangement dating back to the time of the Union, patrons had a right to choose the Member only at alternate general elections; this was so in Bandon Bridge (the 1st and 2nd earls of Bandon sharing the representation with Devonshire), Ennis (Vesey Fitzgerald sharing it with the O’Briens), New Ross (Francis Leigh sharing it with the Charles Tottenhams, father and son) and Wexford (the 2nd marquess of Ely sharing it with the heirs of the former Member Richard Nevill, who died in 1822). A similar agreement between the earls of Desart and Ormonde over Kilkenny broke down during this period. Some changes of patron, for example the usurpation of Gort by Lord Limerick in Limerick borough or of the 3rd earl of Shannon by Devonshire in Youghal, were straightforward examples of political aggrandizement. In other boroughs, such as Downpatrick, Kilkenny, Londonderry and Wexford, the disintegration of the established interests had more to do with independent challenges to the status quo. In the county boroughs, most of which saw a growing number of Catholic freeholders acting in opposition to the Protestant freemen, the cause of independence was identified with that of the campaign for Catholic relief.

A dozen borough Members were brought in by their fathers, about half of whom were peers and half country gentlemen. At least 26 others were returned by their relatives, who in most cases were noblemen. Some of these patrons were former Members who remained commoners, like Richard Pennefather, who briefly returned his son Matthew for Cashel, and Charles Tottenham, who nominated not only his son and namesake, but also his brother-in-law William Wigram, for New Ross. Ten gentry patrons returned themselves for boroughs at some point in this period. Both Owen Wynne, who made way for his son John in Sligo in 1830, and Charles Jephson, who was came in for Mallow in 1826, dominated their respective pocket boroughs, while Sir John Newport in Waterford and (from 1831) Sir Robert Ferguson in Londonderry were unassailable in rather more open constituencies. Leigh represented New Ross for only three years in the early 1820s, preferring to accommodate likeminded Tories for the rest of the time, and Vesey Fitzgerald used Ennis as a fallback in 1831, shortly before inheriting his mother’s peerage. William Meade Smythe came in for Drogheda on the conglomeration of family interests which he belonged to, Henry Evans and Dering each sat for Wexford on the former Nevill interest, and Sir Edward Denny introduced himself as a stopgap for Tralee, which he usually sold to ministerialists. In all, over half the 102 borough Members (of whom seven also sat for an Irish county in this period) were returned on their own or on a family interest.

About a quarter of the remaining borough Members, including most of the non-Irishmen, were brought in as paying guests. Sir Edward O’Brien sold Ennis to Frankland Lewis in 1826, the 2nd earl of Portarlington brought in two Scotsmen (Farquhar and Rae) as well as two Englishmen (David Ricardo and Sir Charles Ogle) for his eponymous borough, and the 3rd earl of Roden nominated another Scot (James Edward Gordon) and three English nonentities (George Hartopp, John Cradock and Charles Barclay), as well as the more important figure of Sir Robert Inglis, for Dundalk. Both Cashel, which provided a berth for Ebenezer Collett and Philip Pusey, and Tralee, which served the same purpose for Robert Vernon Smith and Walker Ferrand, were habitually on the open market. Also made available for Englishmen in search of a seat were the boroughs of Armagh, Bandon Bridge, Carlow, Coleraine, Kinsale and Wexford, while the Hertfords brought in two English relatives for Lisburn and Viscount Ingestre won a seat for Dublin as an anti-reformer in August 1831.

Apart from oddities, such as the influential part played by the Irish Society of London in Coleraine and the fact that the 2nd earl of Roden briefly inserted an employee (John Metge) for Dundalk in 1820, the other borough Members were either returned as nominees of Protestant corporation interests or were elected through the support of independent and Catholic interests. Dublin provided examples of both: Thomas Ellis, George Moore and Frederick Shaw were all anti-Catholic Tories, dependent for their return on the votes of the Protestant freemen, while the two Henry Grattans, father and son, were both pro-Catholic Whigs who attracted support from the Catholic freeholders. If Drogheda witnessed the return of several anti-Catholic corporators, such as Henry Metcalfe, Cork provided a counter-example in that it ended the period with a Member backed by his independent adherents (in the case of John Boyle) and another by his Catholic co-religionists (in the case of Daniel Callaghan). William Wrixon Becher retained his seat at Mallow with the blessing of the Catholic freeholders in 1820, though Jephson later reasserted his influence there. From 1830 or 1831 Members were returned on independent interests from several boroughs, including Downpatrick (Edward Southwell Ruthven), Galway (John James Bodkin), Kilkenny (Nicholas Philpot Leader) and Wexford (Charles Arthur Walker).

 

2

As was the case with the counties, electoral rivalry between patrons and the growing importance of independent and Catholic voters increased the rate of contests in this period. There were 44 contests in the 33 boroughs, an overall rate of 26 per cent: 34 occurred at general elections (at a rate of 26 per cent) and ten (or 27 per cent) of the 37 by-elections were contested, an average of 2½ per Parliament. (The by-elections were caused in 17 cases by the resignation of the sitting Member, a step usually related to private arrangements for seating someone else; in nine by death; in five by appointment to office; in three by the Member being unseated on petition; in two by elevation to the Irish peerage, and in another by Duncannon’s decision to sit for county Kilkenny rather than Bandon Bridge.)64 By comparison with the previous period, this saw an increase in the rate of contests from 13 per cent: between 1801 and 1820 there were 29 contests at general elections (at a rate of 18 per cent) and three (or four per cent) of the 78 by-elections were contested, an average of under one per Parliament. The overall rate of contests rose steeply after the Emancipation and Irish Franchise Acts (though the latter had no direct effect in the boroughs): it was 19 per cent between 1820 and the end of 1828 (18 per cent at general elections and 20 per cent at by-elections), and nearly doubled to 34 per cent (33 per cent at general elections and 35 per cent at by-elections) between the middle of 1829 and 1832.

Most borough contests (18 or 41 per cent) occurred in Leinster, whose nine boroughs accounted for just over a quarter of the country’s total. This development, similar to the alteration that took place in the geographical distribution of county contests, was a significant change from the previous period, when it had experienced only six (19 per cent) of the 32 contests; three boroughs (Drogheda, Dublin and Kilkenny) were contested in the previous and again in this period, when they were joined by three others (Athlone, Carlow and Wexford). Munster, in which 12 or just over a third of the boroughs lay, again came second in the list of provinces in terms of the number of contests. It had 11 (34 per cent) in the previous period and had 13 (30 per cent) in this; four boroughs (Cork, Dungarvan, Limerick and Youghal) were contested in both the previous and in this period, but Kinsale and Waterford, which had been contested before 1820, were uncontested thereafter, and Bandon Bridge and Mallow, which were not contested before 1820, were both twice contested up to 1832. Ulster, in which 10 or just under a third of the boroughs lay, had been the most contested province in the previous period with 13 (41 per cent) of the contests, but had only ten (23 per cent) of the contests in this period; previously uncontested Coleraine and Londonderry joined the three boroughs (Carrickfergus, Downpatrick and Newry) which had also been contested before 1820. Of the two boroughs in Connaught, a seventeenth of the total of 33, only Galway was contested before 1832: twice in the previous period, when it accounted for six per cent of the number of contests, and three times in this period (seven per cent).

In eight (24 per cent) of the boroughs the right of voting was only in the corporation, and each had only 13 electors (or 104 in total); there were one each in Connaught and Leinster, and three each in Munster and Ulster. The largest group of boroughs, numbering 12 (36 per cent) had the franchise in the freemen; there were five in Leinster, four in Munster and three in Ulster. These varied in size between 15 in Enniskillen and Portarlington and about 450, at the start of this period, in Londonderry (or about 1,250 in total, at an average of roughly 100). In another eight boroughs, the county boroughs or ‘freeholder’ boroughs, five of which had over 1,000 electors and so can be classed as ‘large’, the vote was in the freemen and the freeholders together; there were one each in Connaught and Ulster, and three each in Leinster and Munster. Here the electorate ranged from 650 in Drogheda to nearly 4,000 in Cork (or about 14,450 in total, at an average of roughly 1,800). The five others were the Ulster householder boroughs of Downpatrick, Lisburn and Newry (the first two of which, like the corporation and freeman boroughs, were small, having under 500 electors), and the householder and freeholder borough of Dungarvan and the freeholder borough of Mallow (both of which were in Munster and, like Newry, were medium-sized, having between 500 and 1,000 electors at the start of this period). In these five boroughs, the number of electors was about 2,350, or 470 on average: of the two small boroughs, Lisburn had 56 electors and Downpatrick about 400; and of the three medium boroughs, Newry had about 500, Mallow 524 and Dungarvan 871 (or about 1,900 in total, at an average of roughly 630). A rough estimate of the total borough electorate is, therefore, about 18,150, or under a tenth of the pre-1829 county electorate.65

The categorization by size of seven boroughs had changed since the period 1801-20: the unusually large electorate in Londonderry, a freeman borough, now fell to under 500 and the large county borough of Kilkenny was reduced to under 1,000 electors; but the county boroughs of Galway and Limerick now became large and the householder and/or freeholder boroughs of Newry, Dungarvan and Mallow moved from small to medium-sized in terms of their electorates. By 1820 there were, therefore, 22 small boroughs (two-thirds of the whole), including all eight corporation and all 12 freeman boroughs, plus Downpatrick and Lisburn; in them there was a total of about 1,800 electors (or about 80 on average). The six medium boroughs comprised three county boroughs (Carrickfergus, Drogheda and Kilkenny) and three others (Dungarvan, Mallow and Newry); they totalled about 4,300 electors (or about 715 on average). The only five large boroughs were all county boroughs (Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford), which together had about 12,000 electors (or about 2,400 on average). The 11 large and medium boroughs together (a third of the boroughs), accounted for about 16,300 electors, an average of roughly 1,480.

Irish borough contests at general elections and by-elections, by size of electorate:

	1820	1826	1830	1831	by-elections	total
Small	1	0	6	5	3	15
Medium	3	4	4	2	2	15
Large	3	1	4	1	5	14
Total	7	5	14	8	10	44

 

As these statistics show, although there were only half as many of them, the large and medium boroughs produced twice as many contests as occurred in the small boroughs.

However, even more accurate than size as an indicator of the incidence of contests were differences in the type of borough franchise, as the data in this table demonstrates.

Irish borough contests at general elections and by-elections, by type of franchise:

	1820	1826	1830	1831	by-elections	total
Corporation	0	0	1	1	1	3
Freeman	0	0	5	3	2	10
Freeholder	5	4	7	2	7	25
Other	2	1	1	2	0	6
Total	7	5	14	8	10	44

 

None of the corporation boroughs had been contested in the previous period, but in this period Carlow had one contest and Bandon Bridge two (together accounting for seven per cent of the 44 contests). Of the 12 freeman boroughs, the only ones contested before 1820 had been Kinsale, which did not go to the polls in this period, and Youghal, which was again contested once, while Athlone, Coleraine and Wexford had two contests and Londonderry three (23 per cent of the borough contests). All the county boroughs had been contested up to 1820, and all were again except for Waterford. Carrickfergus and Limerick (down from three and two respectively) had two contests, Galway (up from two) three, Kilkenny and Dublin (up from one and two respectively) four, and Cork and Drogheda (both up from three) five (the total of 25 amounting to 57 per cent of all the contested borough elections). Of the five householder and/or freeholder boroughs, Lisburn was again uncontested, Dungarvan and Newry (which had had one and three contests in the previous period) were contested once, and Mallow (up from none) and Dungarvan (down from six) were contested twice (their total representing six per cent of the 44 contests).

Corporation. The corporation boroughs had the smallest electorates and were the most politically inert constituencies in Ireland. Belfast, with its population of over 50,000 by 1831, its increasingly bourgeois prosperity and its exposure to radical influences, had a distinctive political culture, but this was quite separate from its parliamentary representation, which was otherwise on the same level of insignificance as that of the smallest corporation borough, Dungannon (with 3,500 inhabitants). The ten patrons (there were two each in Bandon Bridge and Ennis) dominated their respective boroughs and in half of them (Armagh, Belfast, Dungannon and Sligo) there was barely a risk of any opposition arising against them; Sir Edward Denny, whose father-in-law Judge Robert Day usually acted as agent for the sale, disposed of his Tralee seat for £5-6,000 a time. This predominance rested on landownership and control of the Protestant corporations, some of which were so decayed that the return of a Member to Parliament was their only remaining function. Patrons almost invariably filled up the 13 places in these corporations with their family members and friends or, in the case of the primate’s borough of Armagh, with clergymen. Elections, which can hardly have taken more than a few minutes, were approved by only a handful of electors, even where the full complement of corporators was made up: only two were present at the Belfast election in 1826 and apparently only four witnessed the Ennis election in 1830.

The only occasions when a challenge was thought likely to occur were in Ennis, at the general election of 1826 and at the by-election in April 1828, when a local gentleman might have opposed Sir Edward O’Brien’s nominee, and in Tralee, at the by-elections in September 1828 and June 1829 and the general election of 1830, when the Denny interest might have faced an opponent in Nicholas Leader or Maurice O’Connell. Carlow, where a rumour about a rival candidate surfaced at the general election of 1820, in fact experienced an unofficial poll in 1830, when 80 self-styled freemen voted against the patron’s heir Lord Tullamore, who was elected by the votes of the eight corporators present. A contest in Bandon Bridge at the 1831 general election was the result of rivalry between the two patrons, though the concomitant by-election in July turned on the issue of parliamentary reform, with the English anti-reformer Lord Lowther being defeated by one vote out of 11. Bandon, which provided a refuge for the leading Whig Lord John Russell during the 1826 Parliament, was the exception, in that the other seven corporation boroughs almost always returned Tories. Ignoring the 88 ‘freemen’ polled in Carlow, only 19 votes are known to have been cast in three contests in two corporation boroughs in this period.

Freeman. The six smallest of the 12 freeman boroughs, each with under 50 electors, had a total of about 150 electors, at an average of 25. They included Portarlington, whose 3,000 inhabitants made it the smallest of all the boroughs, and even the largest of these six, Cashel, which had about 7,000 inhabitants, was a miserably poor town. To all intents and purposes, they behaved in exactly the same way as the corporation boroughs; at New Ross, for instance, the franchise was actually in the burgesses, since freemen had been unknown since before the Union. Enniskillen and Portarlington, with only 15 electors, and even New Ross, Cashel and Dundalk, with 24, 26 and 32 respectively, were entirely controlled by their patrons (or joint patrons in the case of New Ross), acting through these only slightly larger corporate bodies. In 1819 Lord Portarlington sold his borough of the same name to Ricardo for £4,000 for a four-year term, the rate of £1,000 a year being not much less than the going rate in England. Attempts were made by Catholics and independents to oppose Roden’s nominees at Dundalk elections in 1824, 1826 and 1830. However, the only one of these six boroughs to be contested, through the exertions of an independent interest, was Coleraine, which had 36 electors, though its total electorate rose to 52 on the inclusion of about two dozen of the 111 freemen who had been admitted (but not sworn) in 1797 and about whom there was a long-running controversy. The Beresford’s Member Brydges polled 22 corporators in 1830, when the former London Member John Thorp had 15 votes tendered in his favour, but polled only 16 in 1831, when another London alderman, William Copeland, received 70 tendered votes and was afterwards seated on petition. Apart from Copeland (and Ricardo, who died in 1823), these boroughs were havens for, usually anti-Catholic, Tories.

The six largest of the freeman boroughs, each with over 50 electors, had a total of about 1,100 electors, at an average of 183. These, which included the much more substantial towns of Clonmel, Londonderry and Wexford, were genuine freeman boroughs, in that the electorate extended beyond the (usually bicameral) corporate body to include a variable number of freemen. However, few of these freemen were traditional professionals and craftsmen who had gained their admission by right of apprenticeship, birth or marriage in the town in which they lived and worked; for instance, in Wexford, only the first means of qualifying applied and the seven-year apprenticeship was a route to the freedom that was fraught with difficulty. Rather, they tended to be honorary freemen, created by gift of the corporation to reinforce the patron’s control and to act at his bidding; they were often not inhabitants, and in Athlone and Londonderry about half the freemen were non-residents. Even where the patron’s grip remained tight, at least up to 1832, small victories were registered by those hostile to the corporation stranglehold. In Kinsale a protester questioned the right of the patron to bring in the inactive Englishman John Russell at the 1826 general election, and in late 1831 a Catholic inhabitant was even admitted as a freeman. In Clonmel, which like Kinsale was uncontested in this period, hopes that an independent candidate would offer in 1820 came to nothing, but the repetition of complaints about exclusion from the freedom bore fruit in 1831 when admissions by right recommenced.

A similar campaign in Youghal led to a token contest in 1830, when a certain Richard Smyth polled three votes before giving up, having made his point about the mayor’s refusal to admit more freemen. This borough, which already had nearly 300 electors (second only to Londonderry in this category) was one of several from which petitions were sent to the Commons to complain about the state of the franchise. Another was Athlone, where it was alleged in a petition in 1829 that there were only 18 resident freemen out of an electorate of about 70, while 350 residents were refused admission by the corporation that year; an Englishman standing against Lord Castlemaine’s nominee Richard Handcock polled only two votes in 1830 and three in 1831, underlining the strength of the patron’s position. By contrast, in Wexford, where Dering was twice defeated (but twice seated on petition) after contests which owed much to proprietorial rivalry, the corporation eventually capitulated to a previous king’s bench ruling and in 1831 admitted 367 freemen, so tripling the electorate. Londonderry, whose dismal corporation was in dire financial straits by the end of this period, was contested three times in 1830 and 1831: at the general election of 1830 and again at the by-election in April 1831 (after the result had been voided), Ferguson, who had inherited the interest of the Beresfords and of their former Member Sir George Hill, was unsuccessfully opposed by an independent, John Hart; and at the 1831 general election Ferguson again won the seat, though by no means as an unequivocal reformer (he soon became one). In addition to Ferguson and John Russell, George Ponsonby, who sat for Youghal, were almost the only Whigs returned for the larger freeman boroughs. Including the votes tendered in Coleraine, a total of 1,333 electors were polled in ten contests in five freeman boroughs, at an average of 133 per election.

Freeholder. The county or freeholder boroughs, which were counties of themselves, were not only substantially larger than the freeman boroughs, with Cork and Dublin having over 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants respectively, but also included a separately qualified element in the form of the 40s. freeholders. In terms of the overall electorates, the three medium boroughs had a total of 2,375 electors, an average of nearly 800, and (as already stated) the five large ones had a total of about 12,000 electors, at an average of 2,400. However, the proportion of freeholders within the individual electorates differed considerably between the boroughs in this group. The smallest among them, with just 9,000 inhabitants in 1831, was Carrickfergus, where the proportion of freeholders among the 800-900 electors probably never rose above ten per cent. As the only county borough in Ulster, it was, in any case, unique in having its freeholders drawn predominantly from the Protestant community. A list of the rival coalition interests compiled in 1826 showed that Donegall was actually in a minority (with 241 electors) compared to the ‘independent interest’ (285).66 A poll that year got no further than the first day when a challenger was put up against his wishes, but in 1830 Donegall lost possession of the borough to the main backer of the independents, Downshire. Waterford, where the Catholic freeholders did not amount to more than six per cent of the electorate, was the only other county borough to have so few freeholders (not more than 80). Despite being the centre of Wyse’s innovations in liberal agitation, it was uncontested during this period, mainly because the active pro-Catholic Whig Newport’s entrenched position discouraged the display of anything more than recurrent murmurs of opposition.

At the other end of the scale, Limerick’s freeholders came to represent as much as two-thirds and possibly as much as three-quarters of the total electorate. This marked a change from the position at the general election of 1820, when the sitting Member John Prendergast Vereker gained the votes of 94 per cent of the 442 freemen polled and his defeated opponent Rice drew support from 59 per cent of the 915 freeholders polled. Rice, who was seated on petition, benefited from the tenant strength of his father-in-law Lord Limerick’s landholdings in the suburbs of the city; it was their joint political supremacy thereafter that led to an increasing number of freeholders being registered at the expense of the Protestant corporation and its patron, Lord Gort, whose puppet Rice easily defeated in 1830. In Galway and Drogheda, where bitter local rivalries provoked severe contests, about half the electorate were freeholders, including a high percentage qualified at the lowest (40s.) rate. In the former, James Daly used his control of the non-resident freemen to dislodge the sitting Member in 1820 and, having deviously contrived to insert an apparently independent candidate as his nominee at the interrupted 1826 election, he again procured his return in the 1830 contest, even though nearly ten times more freeholders polled than did freemen: James O’Hara received the votes of 95 per cent of the 67 freemen voting, but Valentine Blake lost despite receiving the votes of 49 per cent of the 620 freeholders voting. The sectarian exclusiveness of the freeman body and Daly’s monopoly of the representation was only finally broken with the passage of the much fought over Galway Franchise Act of 1831 (1 & 2 Gul. IV, c. 49), which provided for the admission of the Catholic tradesmen to the corporation.

In Drogheda, which was the most contested Irish borough (equal with Cork, on five contests), the success of Metcalfe over Thomas Wallace in 1820, when the Catholic question was the main issue, was largely owing to the Protestant freemen (the winner receiving the votes of 97 per cent of the 251 freemen polled, and the loser those of 62 per cent of the freeholders polled). At the by-election in March 1822 the pattern was blurred by the fact that both corporation and independent interests combined to keep out a worthless attorney, but at the general election of 1826, the pro-Catholic Peter Van Homrigh actually carried the election by reducing the sitting Member Smythe’s support among the 168 freemen to only 51 per cent, and adding 35 per cent of the freemen’s votes (another 14 per cent went to the third man, Wallace) to the votes he received from 87 per cent of the 320 freeholders polled. Yet John Henry North re-established the dominance of the corporation in 1830 and 1831, when independence and parliamentary reform were pertinent concerns: he won the support of 91 and 84 per cent of the 295 and 364 freemen polled at these elections, while the losing candidates Maurice O’Connell and Wallace gained the votes of 98 and 96 per cent of the freeholders polled. These figures indicate how polarized the two sides of the Drogheda electorate had become by the end of this period.

Kilkenny, like the two double Member boroughs Cork and Dublin, had an electorate in which the freeholders made up about 40 per cent of the potential number of voters, which was roughly the average for the eight boroughs in this category. It behaved much as the other boroughs already described, in that in the first three of its four contests in this period the winning candidate, who was brought in by the alternating patrons on the corporation interest, relied on a high proportion of the freeman vote, and the independent and pro-Catholic challengers did relatively much better among the freeholders. At the general election of 1830, for which no analysis of the voting figures is known, Leader beat two other candidates (who may have helped him by splitting the freemen’s votes), so effectively repeating the success of Rice in Limerick in breaking the power of the corporation and opening the borough.

In Cork, an accommodation had been reached whereby one Member was deemed to be the nominee of the Protestant corporation (which had not admitted more than 73 Catholics out of 2,665 freemen by 1831) and the other, who was returned by the Catholic freeholders, sat on the Donoughmore interest. The electoral ambitions of Gerard Callaghan, who provoked a contest against the sitting Members in 1820, illustrated how solid each voting bloc was, at least under usual circumstances. In 1820 he had appealed for the support of the freeholders, but when he stood again in December 1826, in opposition to the late Christopher Hely Hutchinson’s son John, it was on the basis of the freeman vote; not surprisingly, given that he was attempting to win a second seat for the corporation interest, he failed (receiving the votes of only 57 per cent of the 1,542 freemen who voted, compared to Hely Hutchinson’s 79 per cent share of the 447 freeholders polled). After Sir Nicholas Colthurst’s death in 1829, Callaghan stood as the corporation candidate, and normality reasserted itself: he was elected with the votes of 82 per cent of the 574 freemen polled, while his losing independent challenger polled only 40 per cent of the small turnout of 84 freeholders in his favour. He was unseated as a contractor the following year and, precluded from standing again, he put up on the same Protestant interest his brother Daniel, who had retained the family’s Catholic faith. This clearly confused both parts of the Cork electorate since, although Daniel Callaghan beat another local gentleman, he gained support from only 54 per cent of the 1,606, mostly Protestant, freemen who voted, and also attracted the votes of 42 per cent of the 720, predominantly Catholic, freeholders who polled. Donoughmore bowed out, but although Cork experienced a fifth contest at the general election of 1830, on the intervention of another local candidate, the borough thereafter returned, as already mentioned, both an independent and a Catholic reformer.

Like some of the other boroughs in this category, Dublin had a large and viable corporate structure, including a sizeable number of resident freemen by right, some of whom were liberal Protestant in outlook. The implicit compromise that had existed there up to 1820 broke down on the death of Henry Grattan I, whose son and namesake received support from four-fifths of the freeholders but was defeated by the anti-Catholic Thomas Ellis, who gained votes from about two-thirds of the freemen polled at the tumultuous by-election in June 1820. Henry Grattan II was returned unopposed with an Orangeman George Moore in 1826, but four years later he came third in another vicious contest, being beaten by two anti-Catholic Tories, Moore and Frederick Shaw. As in the case of Ellis, the fact that both Moore and Shaw held legal office in Ireland was used against them in Parliament, where the vicissitudes of the city’s affairs were given frequent attention. The defeat of the sitting Members by two reformers at the general election of 1831 was a striking victory, though the Irish administration was implicated in the bribery and corruption that took place; it narrowly escaped censure in the Commons, 23 Aug. 1831, despite a damning report, but at the ensuing by-election Shaw and Ingestre won back the seats as opponents of the Grey ministry’s reform bills. Although Tories regained control of Dublin, reformers of various stripes ended this period sitting for Carrickfergus, Cork, Galway and Kilkenny, and seats at Cork, Limerick and Waterford were occupied by Whigs for most of the 1820s and early 1830s.

The prominence achieved by some of the epic contests in the county boroughs is not surprising, given that after 1829 most of them had total electorates which compared favourably to many of the county constituencies. In fact, Drogheda, Galway, Limerick and Waterford boroughs had approximately the same number of electors as the counties in which they lay, judging by the county figures for 1830, and Cork and Dublin boroughs had considerably more electors than their counties. There had been voices raised in favour of abolishing the 40s. electors in the county boroughs: John Leslie Foster, for instance, complained that the respectable Protestant freemen were being overridden by ‘the most miserable of all 40s. freeholders, such as weavers, day labourers and mendicants, headed by the priests’.67 However, Moore’s attempt to make the provisions of the franchise bill apply to them was negatived without a division, 26 May 1829. Had they been disfranchised, the effect would have been to reduce the county borough electorates substantially; for example, Cork had 833 reserved rights freeholders (who presumably could not qualify as £10 householders) on the registers in 1832, including 608 qualified at the 40s. rate. As it was, about 29,750 freemen and freeholders polled at 25 contests in seven boroughs, at an average of 1,190 per election. Roughly two-thirds of these came from just two boroughs, Cork (about 9,300 in five contests, at an average of 1,860) and Dublin (about 10,600 in four contests, at an average of 2,650), compared to the rest (about 9,850 in 16 contests, at an average of 616).

Householder. In the five other boroughs, the householder and/or freeholder boroughs, the qualification derived from the possession of a certain form of property. Mallow’s electorate was made up only of those owning freeholds of at least 40s. a year within the manor, and Dungarvan’s comprised freeholders and inhabitant householders who could swear to an annual rental of at least £5. In both boroughs, the corporation had long since ceased to exist and the electors were considered to be absurdly impoverished; since these freeholders, unlike their counterparts in the county boroughs, also had a vote in the surrounding county constituencies, they were considered doubly unacceptable. Arguing in March 1829 that the freeholder vote in such places should be abolished, John Wilson Croker noted that, moreover, ‘the frauds and perjuries ... where the election is in the inhabitants registering as of £5 value are more enormous, though less extensive, than those of the 40s. freeholders’.68 Mallow was contested in 1820, when the still just under age Jephson lost to the incumbent Wrixon Becher, in what was seen as a Catholic triumph, and again in 1826, when Jephson re-established the family’s interest by seeing off a challenge from Lord Limerick’s heir. Devonshire’s stranglehold on Dungarvan was not seriously threatened, even at the contest in 1830, when his brother-in-law George Lamb easily defeated an O’Connellite who, curiously enough, had the backing of the Beresfords. Four-hundred-and-twenty polled on that occasion, most of them presumably being freeholders, since the following year the electorate was given as 871, of which 671 or over three-quarters were freeholders.

Of the three £5 householder boroughs, none of which had a corporation, Lisburn was entirely tied up by the Hertfords and had an electorate of only 56. It was not contested in this period, but Downpatrick, which was open and venal, had two contests between rival interests and might have had more, and Newry, the only one of these boroughs to be a substantially populous and prosperous town, had a contest in 1831, when an independent Catholic reformer stood against the sitting Member of the Knox family. Ruthven, who won Downpatrick in 1830, was a Whig, as were all the Members for Dungarvan and Mallow in this period. In total, 2,099 electors were polled at six contests in four of these householder and/or freeholder boroughs, at an average of 350 per election. In all (excluding the Bandon Bridge contest for which figures are unknown), about 33,300 electors polled at 44 contests in 18 boroughs (averaging about 750 per election): about 2,150 voted in 14 contests in eight small boroughs (about 150), about 6,150 voted in 15 contests in six medium boroughs (about 410) and about 25,000 voted in 14 contests in four large boroughs (about 1,785).

 

3

Seven (or 21 per cent) of the boroughs were contested at the general election of 1820, five of them being county boroughs. The sitting Members were re-elected for both Cork seats (one Tory and one Whig) and for Mallow (a Whig), while Tories replaced other Tories by winning contests in Downpatrick, Drogheda, Galway and Kilkenny. Only in Limerick, where Rice was seated vice Vereker on petition, did the Whigs eventually register a gain against ministers. In these seven contests, which mostly lasted for less than a week, a total of about 6,300 voted, or about 900 per borough; at least 2,300 of these polled in Cork, while only 155 cast their votes in Kilkenny. Of the 27 uncontested borough seats, 15 saw no change of Member (11 Tories and four Whigs) and ten witnessed straight party replacements (of nine Tories and of one Whig), while the Whig gain in Youghal was balanced by the Tory gain in Bandon Bridge. Allowing for the inevitable inaccuracies of attributing party allegiance, the Tories among the Irish borough Members had therefore fallen by one to 26 and the Whigs had risen by one to nine. The Dublin Evening Post, which reckoned that ‘ministers have neither lost nor gained in Ireland’, described the borough contests as ‘comparatively trifling’, except for Mallow’s, but hailed the fortnight-long struggles in Galway and Limerick as part of a wider campaign against corporation dominance.69

Much the same could have been said about the explosive Dublin battle in June 1820, when 1,926 were polled over six days, but the only other contested by-election in the 1820 Parliament was the rather less significant one in Drogheda in March 1822, when 622 polled over four days. Ellis’s victory, like the replacement of the late George Coussmaker by Sir Josias Rowley in Kinsale in July 1821 and that of the late Ricardo by Farquhar in Portarlington in March 1824, represented a gain for government. The other nine by-elections between Athlone’s in June 1820 and Dundalk’s in May 1824 involved the replacement of one Tory by another (including Smythe’s success in Drogheda) or, in the case of Dungarvan’s in February 1822, of one Whig by another.

Only five (or 15 per cent) of the boroughs, including four county boroughs, were contested at the general election of 1826, which was two fewer than in 1820. In any case, in one of the five contests, that in Carrickfergus, only eleven polled before the challenger withdrew, so the sitting Member was hardly disturbed. The only election which was considered an outright Catholic victory, matching the county Louth result, was in Drogheda, where 488 polled over four to five days to elect the borough’s recorder, Van Homrigh, as a supporter of Catholic relief, though the defeated Member, Smythe, had voted for this the previous year. James O’Hara, the recorder of Galway, who won that seat after the contest there had descended into violence and chaos, proved to be sympathetic to the cause, but his return was balanced by the success of the anti-Catholic John Doherty against an independent candidate in Kilkenny. In the remaining contest, the pro-Catholic Jephson gained Mallow, whose former Whig Member Wrixon Becher had retired. Just 1,263 electors voted in these five short contests, at an average of 253 per borough, the total being only a fifth as many as had voted at the 1820 general election.

Of the 30 uncontested borough seats, 16 saw no change of Member (12 Tories and four Whigs), and in 11 others the replacement of one Member by another was along party lines (of ten Tories and of one Whig). However, pro-Catholic Whigs replaced anti-Catholic Tories at Bandon Bridge and Kinsale, Henry Grattan junior came in for Dublin instead of the pro-Catholic Tory Sir Robert Shaw, and Lord Tullamore entered the House for Carlow as an anti-Catholic substitute for the former pro-Catholic Tory Member, Charles Harvey. The effect of these alterations was to reduce the number of Tories, which had risen to 29 before 1826, to the same level as after the previous general election, on 26, with the Whigs again raised to nine. Although one liberal newspaper believed the borough results were encouraging for the Catholics, on this analysis the number of pro-Catholic borough Members only rose by one to 16 at this election, compared to 18 anti-Catholics; neither Francis Jack Needham nor John Henry Knox, the Members for Newry before and after the 1826 election, left any clear indication of their attitude on this question.70

There were 13 borough by-elections during the 1826 Parliament, five of which were contested. None of the eight by-elections that took place up to September 1828 resulted in a change of Member’s views on granting Catholic concessions, and presumably had Gerard Callaghan succeeded in his attempt to defeat John Hely Hutchinson in Cork in December 1826, when 1,989 voters polled over about ten days, he would also have voted for them. Lord John Russell replaced Duncannon at Bandon Bridge that month, and Henry Goulburn and Frankland Lewis were re-elected unopposed for Armagh and Ennis in February 1828, following their appointment to office, but Doherty, who had become Irish solicitor-general, was forced into a repeat of the previous Kilkenny contest that month (although only 229 polled this time). Tories were substituted for other Tories in Enniskillen (Arthur Cole for Richard Magenis), Ennis (William Smith O’Brien for Frankland Lewis), Tralee (Denny for James Cuffe and then, nine months later, the Huskissonite Robert Vernon Smith for Denny) and Clonmel (Eyre Coote for Massy Dawson). Sir Robert Wigram beat Dering in Wexford in June 1829, when 127 freemen voted in a two-day poll, but the Commons election committee later reversed the result. There were two more contests in Cork: in June 1829 Gerard Callaghan won the seat in a poll lasting two days and involving 658 electors; and, after he had been unseated, in March 1830 his brother Daniel won the seat in a poll lasting 13 days and involving 2,329 electors. Daniel Callaghan, whose introduction was originally intended to keep the seat warm for Gerard, though in fact he ended up having the longer parliamentary career, was the third Irish Catholic to enter the Commons (after Daniel O’Connell and Lord Killeen) and the first to do so for an Irish borough.

Contests occurred in 14 (or 42 per cent) of the boroughs at the general election of 1830, or nearly three times as many as in 1826. Seven of the eight county boroughs went to the polls, as did five of the 12 freeman boroughs, though the Athlone and Youghal contests, like the one in the corporation borough of Carlow, were fairly token affairs. In ten of the contests, many of which turned on unsuccessful interventions by independent interests, there was no resulting change of Member: six Tories retained their seats (in Athlone, Carlow, Coleraine, Dublin, Galway and, once Dering had been reinstated on petition, Wexford) and three Whigs kept theirs (in Dungarvan, Limerick and Youghal), while Daniel Callaghan’s re-election for Cork owed more to his popularity on the Catholic interest than it did to his former notional adherence to the Tories. John Boyle replaced another Whig, John Hely Hutchinson, as the other Cork Member, and Tories came in for Tories after contests in Drogheda (North for Van Homrigh) and Londonderry (Ferguson for Sir George Hill). Grattan’s loss in Dublin was a gain for ministers, but opposition benefited from the successes in Carrickfergus, where Lord George Hill defeated Sir Arthur Chichester, and Kilkenny, where the O’Connellite Nicholas Leader came in after a contest against two local Whig candidates (with Doherty retreating to an English borough). About 9,600 electors voted in these 14 contests, which was about one-and-a-half times as many as in 1820 and about seven-and-a-half times as many as in 1826. On average, there were about 685 voters per borough, varying between eight in Carlow and 2,803 in Dublin; taking out the high figures of Cork, Dublin and Limerick, the rest of the boroughs had 3,520 polled at an average of about 320.

Although this was the general election at which most boroughs were contested during this period, the extent of popular involvement was still limited. A newspaper summarized one election, under the sarcastic heading ‘Representation’, thus: ‘Saturday last [7 Aug.] William Pennefather jun[ior], mayor of Cashel, held the election of M.P. for the city of Cashel. The Rev. John Pennefather proposed the candidate, William Pennefather sen[ior] seconded him and Matthew Pennefather was elected the Member!!!’71 In the 19 uncontested boroughs, six Tory Members retained their seats and six new ones were returned in the places of other Tories. A Tory replaced a Whig for Bandon Bridge, but the Tralee Member Vernon Smith soon moved away from the Tories and Whigs were returned instead of Tories for Belfast and Downpatrick, on top of which three other Whigs stayed in (as Members for Kinsale, Mallow and Waterford). Overall, the Whigs made four gains, so reducing the Tories’ tally from 26 to 22 and raising their own from nine to 13. Smith and the Whig George Ponsonby were re-elected unopposed for Tralee and Youghal on being appointed to office in the Grey administration. In the only other three by-elections in the short 1830 Parliament, John James Knox, who came in for Dungannon for his Tory brother Thomas, proved to be a reformer, a Tory replaced another for Bandon Bridge, and Ferguson survived another contest (264 voting over six days) for Londonderry.

There were eight contests, most of which involved the issues of independence and reform, at the general election of 1831; this was six fewer than in the previous year, and only three county boroughs were contested. Ruthven retained his seat for Downpatrick and four Tories did likewise for Athlone, Bandon Bridge, Drogheda and Newry. At Londonderry, Ferguson won a third contest in two years by coming out as a cautious reformer, and at Coleraine a Whig was seated in place of Brydges after a petition. Except in Drogheda and Newry, where the polls were open for a week, these were short contests. In Dublin, however, there was a two-week struggle, which eventually resulted in a narrow victory for the lord mayor, Robert Harty, and a liberal barrister, Louis Perrin, as reformers. The 3,613 electors polled there accounted for two-thirds of the 5,573 who voted in the seven contests for which figures survive; even including Dublin, this total was lower than the level in 1820, when there had been one fewer contests. An average of 796 voted per borough or, excluding the extreme case of Dublin, 327 per borough, which was roughly the same rate as in the smaller contested boroughs in 1830. For the 26 uncontested borough seats, six Tory Members continued, as did 12 Whigs, and five Tories replaced others (in Armagh, Dundalk, Ennis, New Ross and Portarlington). A Tory bought a seat previously occupied by Smith for Tralee, but reformers also made gains in Galway (Bodkin coming in for James O’Hara) and Wexford (Walker coming in for Dering), so the Whigs made five gains overall. This increased their total from 14 to 19, so for the first time they took the lead in the Irish boroughs from the Tories, whose tally declined from 21 to 16. The press made much of these changes, with one paper commenting that ‘with the exception of Dirty Drogheda, every open place in Ireland has sent in a reformer’.72

This balance was not changed by the eight by-elections in the 1831 Parliament, two of which were contested. Four Tories made room for Tories in Cashel, New Ross, Armagh and Ennis, and although reformers won seats for Bandon Bridge (Sir Augustus Clifford), after the only proper corporation borough contest in this period, and Drogheda (Thomas Wallace II), after another contest had nearly arisen there, two anti-reformers were elected for Dublin, where Harty and Perrin had been unseated, following another colossal electoral struggle (in which about 2,300 polled over six days). Comparing how the representation of the 35 borough seats had changed between the 1820 general election result and the end of the 1831 Parliament: Tories remained as Members of 14 seats (five corporation boroughs, six freeman boroughs, two householder boroughs and one of the Dublin seats), Whigs still held six seats (Kinsale, Youghal, Dungarvan, Mallow, Waterford and one of the Cork seats), but two Whig seats had gone over to the Tories (Wexford and one of the Dublin seats), while twelve had gone the other way (three corporation boroughs, three freeman boroughs, one householder borough, one of the Cork seats and five other county-boroughs). The Tories had therefore made a net loss of 11 seats (down to 16) and the Whigs, variously defined, a gain of 11 (up to 19).

 

4

Whether or not the election proceedings in Ennis took place in a cellar beneath the causeway or in Mrs. Pinchin’s front parlour, as was alleged, the Irish boroughs had their fair share of mishaps. The windows had to be knocked out of the hall in Mallow in 1826 because of a dangerous lack of air for those crammed inside, while the grand jury box collapsed at Carrickfergus that year and the platform gave way during the Londonderry election in 1831. The crowd managed to put up and ‘elect’ some favourite of theirs in Dundalk in 1826, when Roden’s heavies unceremoniously ejected another such troublesome pretender. At the Cashel by-election in July 1831 the hapless proposer was actually in ignorance of the name of the patron’s chosen Member (Pusey) and proceeded to nominate the wrong person. An unseemly outburst of indignation erupted at Armagh in 1830 at the absence of the sitting Member, Goulburn, and both Eyre Coote in Clonmel and John Russell in Kinsale were denounced at that year’s election as strangers, a frequent enough jibe in boroughs where the Member was habitually returned in absentia. In at least half the boroughs the Members were never in residence, though in the rest the majority of the representatives usually lived in the same county, even if they were not natives of the town. Christopher Hely Hutchinson made much of the finger he lost in a duel arising out of the 1820 Cork election; following the violent by-election there in December 1826 the prominent radical barrister John Bric was shot dead in another pugilistic encounter. Mobs made their presence felt at Newry in 1826, Kilkenny in 1830 and Ennis in 1831, and there were major disturbances in Galway in both 1826 and 1830, when an attack was made on O’Hara’s committee. One man died of a beating in Limerick in 1830 and a woman was accidentally killed in Dublin in 1831. The by-election that took place in the capital in June 1820 was marked by serious rioting and the heavy-handed military response was one of the grievances raised in the subsequent election petition.

Approximately half the boroughs provoked at least one petition after one or more elections during this period. Four elections produced petitions from Dublin, as did three in Cork, Drogheda, Dundalk and Galway. The petition expected from Downpatrick in 1820 never materialised, and plenty of others which did reach the Commons were thrown out or allowed to lapse for one reason or another; for example, one from Athlone in 1826 was dismissed because the petitioners were not themselves electors, and another from Drogheda, which complained that the sheriffs had refused to open the polls at the by-election in October 1831, was not pursued. Even when the allegations were serious, as were those contained in the 1826 Kilkenny petition (about the non-admission of legitimate freeholder votes and the unlawful interference of two peers), the committee was likely to confirm the outcome of the election; following the 1830 general election, committees reported in favour of the proceedings at Athlone, Carlow, Carrickfergus, Cork, Drogheda and Galway. On four occasions committees reversed the original result of the elections: for Limerick in 1820, on the grounds of bribery and the polling of the non-resident freemen; for Wexford in 1829 and again in 1830, because of the rejection of the votes of freemen by right of apprenticeship; and for Coleraine in 1831, again on account of the hitherto disputed voting rights of the freemen. Three other times the Commons ordered another election to be held: for Cork in 1829, on the basis that Gerard Callaghan was a government contractor; for Londonderry in 1830, because Ferguson had resigned the mayoralty in order to stand for Parliament; and for both seats for Dublin, owing to the involvement of the Irish administration and palpable corruption. In each of these three cases, the subsequent election was itself the subject of a further petition.

Evidence suggests that the cost of most borough elections, including customary expenses of a few hundred pounds, did not amount to more than £1-2,000, even if there was a short contest. John Hart spent only £4,119 in unsuccessfully contesting Londonderry twice and county Londonderry once in the space of a year. At the more expensive end of the market, winning a Dublin seat cost Frederick Shaw £10,000 in 1830, a little less than the sum his father Sir Robert had spent in 1806, while the elected reform candidates ran up joint costs of £21,000 in 1831. The larger venal boroughs were naturally more expensive, with Drogheda reputed to have cost each candidate £10,000 at the 1822 by-election, when individual votes apparently went for £40 or £50 each, and North spent £5-10,000 to gain the seat in 1830. Some Members must have racked up enormous costs over time; for example, Gerard Callaghan seems to have spent at least £24,000 fighting three Cork contests, of which another (in March 1830) cost the losing candidate an estimated £15-18,000. Devonshire, a leviathan of wealth, presumably thought little of the more than £20,000 he paid out to consolidate his interest at Youghal in the early 1820s. The ‘Charles Street gang’ of Tory party organizers made at least £12,500 available in 1831 for Irish elections, probably most of them boroughs.73 This was possibly only a fraction of the amounts that Tory governments had expended during the previous decade or that the Grey ministry released from the usual secret service funds for contests that year, notably in Dublin. Ministers continued to purchase about half a dozen seats for their supporters, at least up to 1830;74 for instance, Carlow was offered as a safe berth for a ministerialist in 1820, when government also tried to intervene to settle a private dispute in Armagh. As in the counties, ministers used whatever leverage was at hand to influence elections in favour of their friends, and their role was particularly crucial in such boroughs as Cork and Dublin, where patrons and electors expected government to give them a clear lead.

 

Dublin University

The representation of Trinity College, the only university seat outside England, was quite unlike that of Oxford or Cambridge in that the right of voting was in the provost, fellows and scholars rather than in the doctors and masters of arts. It was also unique among the Irish constituencies in how it conducted its elections, canvassing meetings being disallowed for instance, although its small electorate was by no means the lowest in the country. In many ways it resembled one of the freeman boroughs, with the fellowship forming a kind of corporate body and the scholars in situ being a small and biddable group of electors. The 18 senior and seven junior fellows tended not to move on, though two of the provosts were made bishops in this period, so they provided a high level of continuity. However, unlike freemen for life, the 70 scholars exercised the franchise only for a few years, being elected from among the third year students and becoming ineligible once they obtained the seniority of masters of arts. This injected an element of instability into the electorate, though the fellows had their cliques and favourites among the scholars, so the outcome of contested elections may not have been quite so uncertain as might have appeared. The university seat also mimicked most of the pocket boroughs in terms of its staunch Protestantism, with the difference that its high national profile meant that it was looked to by leading anti-Catholics as one of the principal upholders of the existing constitution. A branch of the Brunswick Club was established in the university in 1828.

Yet its Member since 1812 had been William Plunket, who became the Commons spokesman for the Catholic cause in succession to Grattan in the early 1820s, despite being the Liverpool government’s attorney-general for Ireland from 1822. Croker, the secretary to the admiralty, had long laid claim with ministers to a reversionary interest in the seat, which he had several times refrained from contesting out of respect for Plunket’s standing. He got his chance in June 1827, when Plunket was given an Irish peerage and a senior judgeship, but was forced into a contest by two Dublin barristers, the pro-Catholic John North and the anti-Catholic Thomas Lefroy. Lefroy won the seat after another severe contest in 1830, when North’s renewed intervention scuppered Croker’s chances, and held it in 1831, despite having the Grey administration’s solicitor-general for Ireland, Crampton, put up against him as a reformer. The Members in this period were therefore all Tories, though Plunket, who came from the Grenvillite stable, was on the liberal wing of the party, as was Croker, at least until his opposition to parliamentary reform drove him into the arms of those rigidly opposed to the reform bill, a group that included Lefroy, an Ultra. The Members were all Trinity men, though Croker presumably suffered from not being resident in Dublin, where Lefroy maintained an active role even following his election to Parliament.

Dublin University had been contested at four of the five general elections and at the only by-election during the previous period. Between 1820 and 1832 it was contested at two of the four general elections and at one of the two by-elections. An average of 83 voters polled at the three contests in this period; the surviving poll lists show a reasonably high level of voting consistency by the partisans of each candidate. None of these generated an election petition. Even uncontested elections tended to be rowdy affairs, with the unfranchised students participating in the high jinks. Plunket was violently treated during his unopposed return in 1826, as was North at the by-election the following year. Internal issues, such as the future of the celibacy statute, the effect of the planned ecclesiastical leases bill and the likely alteration of the franchise under the Grey ministry’s reform proposals, were all aired thoroughly, but elections were most affected by the national issues of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. Government intervention was constant and overt, with ministers attempting to mediate between the conflicting ambitions of their friends, usually by seeking to persuade them to accept alternative berths. Peel kept Croker under control at the beginning of this period, but Canning and Wellington failed to prevent North from competing against Croker, and the Grey government could not displace Lefroy in 1831, even though it deployed its backing for Crampton and his friends among the fellows. The college remained a Conservative stronghold for years to come.

 

The Members

Henry Grattan senior was reported to have prophesied to George Tierney shortly after the Union that Ireland would, within a few years, ‘pour into the bosom of your legislature, a hundred of the damnedest rascals’.75 This judgement, though there was some element of truth in it by the end of this period, was still premature in 1820, when, as during the previous 20 years, the Irish Members were mostly drawn from the same social classes and subscribed to the same social mores as their English counterparts.76 Some leading Irish families, such as the Ponsonbys and the Wellesleys, effectively now operated in British political circles, though one of the latter, Marquess Wellesley, was resident as lord lieutenant from 1822 to 1828. They were among the roughly 22, or ten per cent, of the Irishmen who sat for Irish seats in this period, who had permanent residences in England. Over a hundred, or at least half of the non-British Members representing Ireland, were educated in England for some or all of their childhood; the barristers were obliged to undertake a nominal period of study at one of the London inns of court before being called in Dublin. As with the English Members, a significant proportion of the 212 Irishmen sitting for Irish seats saw service in the military or voluntary services: about 50 were army or naval officers, and about 75 at some point served in the Irish militia or yeomanry.

Ninety, or just over a third of the total of 245 Irish Members, were directly connected to the peerage, including twelve who succeeded to titles during this period. Six of these were eldest or only sons of Irish peers: Viscount Jocelyn, Viscount Castlereagh, the earl of Bective, Viscount Bernard, Francis Jack Needham (Viscount Newry) and the earl of Mount Charles; the last two, who inherited in November and December 1832, had left the Commons in 1826 and 1831 respectively. The other four, like a further six who inherited titles from other relations, were all still Members when they succeeded: James Wandesford Butler (from his brother), John Maxwell Barry (from his cousin), Thomas Henry Skeffington (from his mother), Sir Ulysses Bagenal Burgh (from his cousin), William Vesey Fitzgerald (from his mother) and John Hely Hutchinson I (from his uncle). Of these, only the ministers Castlereagh (2nd marquess of Londonderry), who transferred to Orford, and Burgh (2nd Baron Downes), who subsequently sat for Queenborough, moved to non-Irish constituencies, as they were required to do, under the terms of the Union, if they wished to remain in the Commons. (About a dozen Irish peers sat in the House during this period, of whom only these two, plus Lords Carhampton and Dunalley, were strictly speaking Irish in origin.) Another 34 Members, including 27 eldest or only sons (of whom three were Englishmen), inherited Irish and/or United Kingdom peerages after 1832, though in at least two cases (those of Richard Handcock and Henry Maxwell) their fathers did not themselves hold a title during this period. Six heirs (including Henry Joseph Conyngham, earl of Mount Charles, and Richard Hare, Viscount Ennismore, who died in 1824 and 1827) predeceased their noble fathers, and four aristocratic bastards also sat in this period (Sir John Poo Beresford, Sir Augustus Clifford, James Cuffe and Richard Wellesley). Twenty younger sons and eight other kinsmen, plus six Englishmen, added another 34 to the number of Members related to the peerage.

No sitting Members were awarded Irish peerages between 1820 and 1832, but Irish titles were subsequently bestowed on Sir Patrick Bellew, Dominick Browne, Charles Brownlow, Robert Shapland Carew, James Daly and Henry Villiers Stuart (of whom Carew alone later also held a United Kingdom title). Only Barry (Lord Farnham), who won a severe contest in 1825, entered the Lords as a representative peer during this period, although another 12 of these Irish Members subsequently did so (including Vereker in 1865, 45 years after leaving the Commons, shortly before his death). In this period, four Irish Members were promoted to the Lords from Irish seats (Arthur Chichester II, John Foster, William Plunket and William Wellesley Pole); three United Kingdom titles were created for Members who had already succeeded to Irish peerages (James Wandesford Butler, Viscount Jocelyn and the earl of Bective); an English title descended to one Member (Skeffington, who had already got an Irish peerage from his mother), and two Members succeeded holders of combined Irish and United Kingdom titles (the earl of Mount Charles and John Hely Hutchinson I). After 1832, United Kingdom titles were awarded to Arthur French II, Sir Henry Parnell, Thomas Spring Rice, Henry White and John Young (as well as the Englishmen Lord John Russell and Robert Vernon Smith), plus Viscount Acheson, the earl of Belfast and Lord Duncannon, all three of whom subsequently inherited Irish titles; three Members who by then held Irish peerages were promoted into the Lords (Carew, Robert Wogan Talbot and Vesey Fitzgerald); three Englishmen (Lord Beauchamp, John Hobart Cradock and Viscount Ingestre) and Lord Arthur Hill (whose mother was suo jure Baroness Sandys) inherited United Kingdom peerages, and 12 others succeeded holders of combined Irish and United Kingdom titles. Altogether, therefore, 52 of the 245 Irish Members entered the Lords, ten up to the end of this period and 42 thereafter.

Most of those who later held peerages were drawn from the gentry, broadly defined, from whom sprang about two-thirds of the Irish Members in this period. Some of these country gentlemen were, like the knight of Kerry, proprietors of considerable estates, but most of the rest, including those who had risen through military service, the bar or commercial activities, such as George Vaughan Hart, Tom Lefroy and Sir John Newport, were already assimilated into the landed elite by this period. A handful of Members came from obscure backgrounds, such as the nabob Michael George Prendergast, or had lowly origins, including the barrister Louis Perrin, whose father was a Huguenot exile and French language teacher. The Callaghan brothers, who were navy contractors, Robert Way Harty, a hosier, and Nathaniel Sneyd, a wine merchant, were typical of a small group of about a dozen Members whose status derived from mercantile wealth. Both Henry Metcalfe and John Doherty were the sons of attorneys, but while the former followed in this branch of the law, the latter made his fortune as a barrister, an occupation that also brought to prominence John Carroll, George Moore and Thomas Wallace II. In total, 60 Members (plus six Englishmen) received some education at an inn of court, usually the King’s Inns in Dublin, and 34 of these were called; 12 (plus Daniel O’Connell, who received a patent of precedence) became king’s counsel, of whom over half later held judgeships, including Plunket, who was appointed lord chancellor of Ireland in November 1830. Like O’Connell, Sheil and Wyse were barristers, but the majority of the Catholics who sat for Irish seats by the end of this period were minor gentry. Twenty-seven of the Irish Members (including three non-Irishmen) inherited or were awarded baronetcies before or during this period, and seven others (including two non-Irishmen) later became baronets. Perhaps a dozen others, then or afterwards, were knights, including those who were given honours for service in the armed forces; James Wandesford Butler (as Lord Ormonde) and Viscount Jocelyn (as Lord Roden) were made knights of St. Patrick in 1821, and 11 other Members were later recipients of this knighthood, which was reserved for senior members of the Irish peerage.

The Irish Members Castlereagh, Duncannon, Vesey Fitzgerald (till dislodged from Clare) and Wellesley Pole held cabinet office at some point in this period, as did the Englishmen Goulburn, who was briefly Irish secretary while sitting for Armagh from 1826, and Lord John Russell, who was Member for Devon by the time he joined Grey’s cabinet in June 1831. Thirteen others (including the Englishmen George Lamb and Robert Vernon Smith) held junior ministerial office sometime prior to 1832, as did another eight thereafter. Lord Belfast, Lord George Beresford, Viscount Forbes and Henry King were among a handful of Members who were officials in the royal household, which was a subsequent source of employment for several others. A profusion of minor Irish appointments were shared out among the Members, at least 50 of whom held local office on one or more occasions, mostly as sheriffs. Upwards of 20 Members were colonels of county militias while sitting in this period, and ten more subsequently rose to that rank. Some of these were among the 24 governors or joint-governors of counties who sat in this period, of whom ten combined a governorship with the office of custos rotulorum. The Grey ministry’s appointments to the new county lord lieutenancies in late 1831 included 11 who had sat for Irish seats in this period, plus the 5th earl of Darnley, Member for Canterbury until 1830. Five Members were made lord lieutenants of the counties for which they were then sitting (Bellew, Carew, Fitzgibbon, Forbes and Oxmantown), and three others had sat in this period for the counties to which they were appointed (James Wandesford Butler, William Vesey Fitzgerald and Henry Villiers Stuart), while the Tipperary Member John Hely Hutchinson I succeeded to his uncle’s peerages and to the lord lieutenancy of that county in 1832.

Of the 245 Members who occupied Irish seats between 1820 and 1832, 41 (or a sixth) were survivors from the pre-1801 Irish Commons (as were a few others who now represented English constituencies). John Foster, who had entered the Irish Parliament nearly 60 years earlier, was the longest serving Member in 1820, and the only one to have first sat at Dublin in the 1760s; four had been elected during the 1770s (Grattan senior, Richard Martin, Charles O’Hara and Owen Wynne), nine during the 1780s and 27 during the 1790s, of whom several had only sat for a brief period prior to the Union. In 27 of these 41 cases, the Member’s father had also sat for the Irish Commons and, in six cases, in the United Kingdom Commons as well. The fathers of another 82 Members had once sat in the Irish Commons, including, in relation to the fathers of 45 Members, in the United Kingdom Commons also. (Altogether, 109 Members’ fathers had had seats in the defunct Dublin Commons.) In addition to the 51 Irish Members’ fathers who had careers spanning both Dublin and Westminster, there were 28 Members whose father had sat only in the United Kingdom Commons, of whom 16 were Irish and 12 were English. Twenty-five Members (out of 79 in total) had fathers who also sat at some point between 1820 and 1832, though in only five cases did their period of service overlap (Richard and William Hare, Thomas and Anthony Lefroy, Daniel and Maurice O’Connell, and Luke and Henry White, while the Englishman John Russell sat for Kinsale at the same time as his father Lord William Russell was Member for Tavistock). Denny’s son and namesake had actually preceded him in the representation of Tralee, and Duncannon’s son John George Brabazon Ponsonby and Wellesley Pole’s son William Pole Tylney Long Wellesley represented English constituencies. There were about 20 instances of two or more brothers sitting during this period, though they did not always do so at the same time.

A total of 113 Members (including 16 non-Irishmen), about half the Irish Members in this period, had previously sat in the British House of Commons, though not always formerly for Irish seats. Only two (Wellesley Pole and Castlereagh), both of whom were sometime Members of the Dublin Commons, had first sat at Westminster before 1801; 62 (of whom four were non-Irishmen) came in during the first decade of the nineteenth century, including 19 who sat from 1801, and 49 (of whom 12 were non-Irishmen) were elected in the 1810s, including 20 (of whom three were non-Irishmen) in 1818. Of the 113 former Members, 98 (including 13 non-Irishmen) were sitting at the time of the dissolution in early 1820; six of the remaining 15 came back in at the general election of 1820 (including three who had only been out for one Parliament), and five more came in again at by-elections during the 1820 Parliament (including Leigh, who had been out of the House for 20 years before he was re-elected in February 1821), with the four others being returned between 1826 and the dissolution in 1832. (The last, Sir Augustine Fitzgerald, was elected for Ennis in February 1832 after 14 years out of the Commons.) Nine Members remained in continuous possession of their seats for the entirety of the four Parliaments from 1820 to 1832: the county Members Archdall, Thomas Bernard, Brownlow, Fitzgibbon, Forbes, Lord Arthur Hill, John O’Neill and Parnell, plus the borough Member Newport. Three Members (Lord Belfast, Arthur Chichester I and William Wigram) sat throughout, but in doing so represented two different constituencies, and three others (Sir John Beresford, George Robert Dawson and Horace Beauchamp Seymour) only maintained an unbroken record by retreating to an English constituency.

About 50, or a fifth, of the Irish Members (including perhaps ten non-Irishmen) were noticeably lax in their attendance in Parliament. World-weariness clearly accounted for the despair of Sir Edward O’Brien, who commented after his return to the chamber following the 1820 general election, that ‘I entered it yesterday without a single feeling of either interest in the proceedings or pleasure at finding myself in a situation, the ambition of so many and the cause of such immense expense’.77 Service abroad, as in the case of Vesey Fitzgerald, who was envoy to Sweden in the early 1820s, accounted for some of the absenteeism, but ill health, together with the cost and inconvenience of travelling between Ireland and London, were the more usual reasons for non-attendance. Such Members as the only sporadically active Henry Caulfeild tended to be present only towards the end of the session, when most of the Irish business traditionally came on.78 Loyal, older supporters of government sought leave to absent themselves and could create problems for the leader of the House; Canning’s secretary endorsed a long screed from Denis Browne, 14 Jan. 1826, with a note that it expressed ‘his wish to stay in Dublin till the beginning of March, if you can spare him’, to which the exasperated foreign secretary added, ‘Let him stay till doom’s day, if he will not plague me with a correspondence upon it’.79

At the other end of the scale were a group of at least 20 Irish Members who were extremely active in the Commons. These included leading ministers, such as Castlereagh, and the most indefatigable and well-informed of the Irish Whigs, notably Leader, Newport, Parnell and Rice. The Cork and Dublin Members were required to be reasonably active on local business, and even the representatives of smaller towns, particularly John Henry Knox as Member for Newry, Smith O’Brien as Member for Ennis and James O’Hara as Member for Galway, could prove themselves unusually assiduous in forwarding the interests of their constituents on specific occasions. The Irish rode their hobby horses as unremittingly as other Members, Richard Martin’s concerns for animal welfare being a good example. They also punched at about their weight in terms of speeches delivered: during the Wellington ministry, there were six Irishmen (Daniel O’Connell, Rice, George Moore, Parnell, George Dawson and Newport) among the top 42 most frequent speakers (or one in seven, the same proportion of Irish Members to the total size of the House).80 As in the previous period, Irish novices, especially where their liberal reputations preceded them, found it hard to acclimatize themselves to the susceptibilities of the chamber. Thomas Wallace II, then sitting for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, failed in his first major outing on the Catholic question, 12 May 1828, and neither O’Connell nor Sheil, for all their differences of style, was at first considered a success in 1830. By then, the entry of several Catholics and Liberal Protestants had slightly increased the number of regular attenders, among whom James Grattan was probably alone in keeping a parliamentary diary. To his surprise, Macnamara, who claimed to be constantly in the House during its sittings in the early 1830s, found that he thrived on the horrendously late nights, but the reform debates reportedly proved to be the death of Alexander Dawson, North, Owen O’Conor and Somerville.

Up to three-quarters of the Irish Members at any one time were generally reckoned to be ministerialist lobby-fodder, with about 20 being part of the payroll vote. Peel and his successor as Irish secretary Charles Grant maintained lists of patronage applications (successful and pending) into the early 1820s, and also drew up a state of the Irish Members as elected in 1818 and 1820, which together suggest that this was roughly the case.81 The application books included peers and other non-Members, as well as a handful of men who were not returned again in 1820 (though John Leslie Foster, to whom this applied, came back in later in the 1820s). Managing such excessive demands for Irish patronage as those made by Gustavus Hume Rochfort was clearly a distasteful operation.82 However, the gratification of requests, like Arthur Chichester I’s for a baronetcy (which he received in 1821), could create a loyal friend to the Liverpool ministry, as it did in Chichester’s case (though he later voted for reform).83 The careful monitoring of which Members had applied for places for themselves or their friends was also a crucial part of maintaining support among the Irish: under John Carroll’s name, it was written that he ‘wants a commissionership of appeals’, but soon afterwards it was added in red ink that ‘since this was written he has vacated his seat’.84

In fact, a dozen of the Members returned at the general election of 1820, or seated on petition or chosen at by-elections to the end of 1821, were omitted from the potential total of 115 on these lists. Five of them were new Members at the general election (Hyde, O’Grady, William Stuart and Waring Maxwell, plus Michael Prendergast, who was new to his Irish seat), two were Roden’s nominees at Dundalk (Metge and Hartopp), and another five were new at by-elections (Ellis, Forde, James Grattan and Sir Josias Rowley, plus Richard Wellesley, who was new to his Irish seat). Two Members (Vereker, sub Lord Gort, and William Wigram, sub Lord Ely), were only included through mention of their electoral patron, as was also true of Rice (sub Lord Limerick), who, like Stephen Mahon, was specifically described as being in opposition.85 Of the remaining 103 names on the combined lists, 76 had some, mostly a strong, connection to government: 47 had received patronage and were considered supporters; 16 not having yet received any largesse, had made requests for patronage and were likewise considered friends; 11 (including, wrongly as it proved, Rice) were noted as having lodged patronage demands, and two (Charles Harvey and Thomas Skeffington) were included only as ‘government’, with no mention being made of patronage. On the other side of the political divide, 27 Members were characterized as ‘opposition’, including four who had formerly received some form of patronage: Richard Wogan Talbot, whom Stephen Mahon now joined in voting with the Whigs, plus Thomas Knox and William Plunket, who were still Grenvillites.

This accords closely with the analysis presented above, in which it was shown that following the 1820 election there were 73 Members (46 county, 26 borough and one university) broadly in support of the Liverpool administration and 27 inclining to opposition (18 county and nine borough Members). John Marshall’s survey, taken in the middle of the 1820 Parliament, found only 51 government supporters and/or office-holders, 23 opposition voters, and 21 who had a mixed voting record (plus five left unaccounted for).86 However, of the 21 Members voting both ways, 16 can be classified as Tories, though about half of these (such as Forde) were admittedly wayward, and four were clearly Whigs, with the last (Westenra) being independent: adding in these figures would give totals for government and opposition of 67 and 25. If the erratic voting pattern of Robert ‘Bull and Mouth’ Smyth was unique, it was reasonably common for some Irish Members to divide as their consciences dictated and not always along Westminster party lines. In any case, with the relaxation in the mid-1820s of the animus of party struggles in the Commons, there was greater scope for the expression of personal viewpoints. There were also several issues of great Irish importance on which it became possible to dissent from government, if only temporarily: for example, on 11 May 1824, when government conceded a select committee even after Lord Althorp’s call for an inquiry into the state of Ireland had been defeated. After the 1826 general election there were 66 Members (39 county, 26 borough and one university) broadly in support of the administration and 34 (25 county and nine borough) Members in opposition. Little long-term change arose as a result of the Canning and Goderich governments, so, according to one calculation, during the Wellington ministry, which covered the last three sessions of the 1826 Parliament, there were 66 ministerialists, 24 opponents and ten independents, although it would be wrong to see these as necessarily cohesive groupings.87 Wellington later claimed that pre-reform governments had invariably been able to count on the backing of 70 Irish Members, and this was broadly true up until the general election of 1830.88

Not least because of the clearly expressed preference of the majority Catholic population in about half the constituencies, the Irish Members were also seen to be numerically in favour of Catholic relief, at least outside Ulster.89 Of 162 Irish Members voting between 1805 and 1817, 79 divided only for and 59 only against, with 18 others changing sides (a net gain of four for relief) and three vacillating; on 3 May 1819 a new high of 57 Irish Members voted in favour of concessions, as against 34 who were hostile.90 Of the 62 Members (including nine non-Irishmen) who sat in this period but had left the House by 1826, 30 were anti-Catholic, 30 (including the converts Forde and Pakenham) were pro-Catholic, and two others (Sir Ross Mahon and Francis Needham) did not vote on this issue. As calculated above, there were 37 anti-Catholics (19 county and 18 borough Members) following the 1826 general election, and 62 pro-Catholics (45 county and 16 borough Members, plus one from Dublin University), with one unclassified. About half of the pro-Catholics, including 24 county Members, were Tory ministerialists, who otherwise almost always tended to back government in related issues, for instance over the suppression of the Catholic Association in February 1825.

There was an almost 2:1 majority for pro-Catholic sympathisers among the 116 Irish Members who remained in the House or were new to it from 1826. The number voting at various times against emancipation was 34 (of whom eight were non-Irishmen), including a rare Whig in the form of the Tyrone Member William Stewart. Nine of these 34 were Orangemen, of whom there were at least 16 in the Commons during this period, some of them of very long standing (for instance, Mervyn Archdall, Lord George Beresford, Sir Galbraith Cole, Edmond Macnaghten, George Moore and Nathaniel Sneyd); about half were active Brunswickers during 1828-9.91 Of the 34 counted as hostile, Sir John Beresford, who was absent, and Macnaghten, who abstained, plus the Englishmen Collett and Horace Seymour, who (like several others) was now sitting for an English constituency, did not vote in the final divisions in 1829. By that time, as many as 14 had changed to a favourable position on the Catholic cause: half of these were either high profile converts (Brownlow and Dawson) or Members who responded more ambiguously to the prevailing mood (Burgh, Colthurst, Richard Hare, Otway Cave and Westenra), and half were Irishmen (John Leslie Foster, Sir George Hill, Saunderson and William Stewart) or non-Irishmen (Goulburn, Harvey and Rae) who followed government’s lead in conceding emancipation. As many as 66, including three non-Irishmen (George Lamb, Thomas Frankland Lewis and Lord John Russell), voted consistently for the Catholic cause; this figure included a number of older converts (such as Thomas Bernard, Henry Bruen and Sir Robert Shaw), and one or two occasionally wayward voters (such as Thomas Knox). Only John Henry Knox and John Russell failed to vote on this issue.

In the course of preparing his lists of Members’ attitudes to the Catholic question, Joseph Planta, the patronage secretary, noted that the number of Irish Members in the pro-Catholic majority on 28 Feb. 1821 had been 36, and that this had risen to 53 in the minority on 6 Mar. 1827 and to 61 in the majority on 12 May 1828, the number of Irish Members on the anti-Catholic side being 26, 31 and 28 respectively. According to his ‘statement of the manner in which the Irish Members of the present Parliament have voted upon the Catholic question, or may be expected to vote’, there were thought to be 60 pro-Catholics (from 44 county, 15 borough and one university seats) with probably two others, and 32 anti-Catholics (from 16 county and 16 borough seats) with probably four others; the remaining two Irish Members were Denny, whose views were unknown, and Daniel O’Connell, who had not yet tried to take his seat. When compared with Planta’s list of all the Members, the 62 pro-Catholics were divided into 31 who were expected to be ‘with government’, 29 Whigs who were categorized as being ‘opposed to securities’, one who was ‘doubtful’ (Brownlow) and another ‘absent’ (William Stewart); and the 36 anti-Catholics were divided into 15 deemed likely to be ‘with government’, 18 diehards who were ‘opposed to the principle’ of emancipation and three other absentees (Brydges, John Russell and Viscount Stopford).92

Planta was accurate in his predictions regarding the pro-Catholics, of whom 60 (including Brownlow and William Stewart, but excluding Sir Nicholas Colthurst and Thomas Kavanagh) voted for emancipation on 6 and/or 30 Mar. 1829. However, he was less successful in his forecast relating to the anti-Catholics, since only five (Charles Barclay, George Dawson, John Leslie Foster, Henry Goulburn and Sir George Hill) of the 15 believed to be likely to be ‘with government’ actually voted for emancipation in these two divisions, though one of those considered ‘opposed to the principle’ (Saunderson) unexpectedly divided in its favour. Altogether 66 Irish Members voted for emancipation in these two divisions (30 Whigs, including William Stewart, 30 pro-Catholic Tories, including Dawson, plus the other six formerly anti-Catholic Tories). The 23 who voted against it comprised six anti-Catholics who had been thought likely to be ‘with government’ (Sir Arthur Chichester, Farquhar, Viscount Corry, Henry Lowry Corry, Henry Meynell and William Wigram) and 16 diehards, plus Brydges, who was in fact present. Half the diehards were Ultras of varying degrees of alienation from ministers: Archdall, Handcock, Henry King, Maxwell, O’Neill, Rochfort, Shirley and Tullamore. As well as those already mentioned (Denny, O’Connell, John Russell, Viscount Stopford, Colthurst and Thomas Kavanagh), also apparently absent in 1829 were Collett, Robert King, John Henry Knox, Macnaghten and Waring Maxwell.

The general election of 1830, when the Irish peer Viscount Clifden’s son George Agar Ellis noted that ‘the papers talk of government losing 23 or 24 by the Irish elections’, marked the point at which the Wellington ministry ceased to be supported by a majority of the Irish Members. Writing to Brougham, the Whig whip Duncannon listed six government gains (in Bandon Bridge, Drogheda, Dublin, Leitrim, Monaghan and Westmeath), but also 11 government losses (in Clare, Dublin University, county Galway, Kerry, Kilkenny, county Londonderry, Longford, Mayo, Roscommon, Tipperary and county Wexford).93 This net gain of five to opposition was repeated by Brougham in his pamphlet on the outcome of the election, although he substituted O’Grady’s return as a Whig in county Limerick for William Browne’s success in Kerry as a gain.94 Brougham’s calculation, based on Duncannon’s letter, proved to be an underestimate, though the scale of government losses did not quite match Agar Ellis’s report. Judging by the analysis presented in the county and borough sections, the number of Tories fell at this election from 65 to 48, made up of 25 county and 22 borough Members, plus the University Member (Tom Lefroy), while the number of Whigs rose from 34 to 50 (37 county and 13 borough Members) and the O’Gorman Mahon joined Daniel O’Connell as the only genuine Repealers. Of course, it was not until the fall of the administration and the introduction of the new government’s reform proposals that the true scale of the Tory decline became apparent.

This transition is made slightly clearer by a comparison of the lists compiled by Pierce Mahony in August and by Planta in September 1830.95 Mahony, conforming to the usual practice of assigning three-quarters of the Members as ministerialists, classed 74 of the 100 Irish Members (45 county and 29 borough Members) as for the government, nine (mostly Whigs, with O’Connell) as against the government and 17 ‘neutral’ (including several Whigs and disaffected Tories).96 Planta, probably more accurately, put the government strength at only 52 ‘friends’, with the mostly Whig ‘foes’ numbering 21; the remaining 27 were divided between a range of different categories of increasing hostility to ministers, namely eight ‘moderate Ultras’, six ‘good doubtfuls’, three ‘doubtful doubtfuls’, four ‘violent Ultras’, five ‘bad doubtfuls’ and one member of the ‘Huskisson party’. All nine of Mahony’s anti-government Members were among Planta’s ‘foes’, including the Englishman George Lamb. Ten of Mahony’s ‘neutrals’ were likewise ‘foes’, and the other seven ‘neutrals’ comprised three ‘moderate Ultras’ (Anthony and Thomas Lefroy, plus Tullamore), one ‘doubtful doubtful’ (Killeen), one ‘violent Ultra’ (Henry King), one ‘bad doubtful’ (Lord William Fitzgerald) and, surprisingly, a ‘friend’ in the form of Wyse. Of Mahony’s 74 ministerial supporters, 51 (including seven Englishmen) were included by Planta among their ‘friends’, but a third of this group were hardly traditional loyalists. In fact, the other 23 Members were made up of five ‘moderate Ultras’ (Bateson, Handcock, Theobald Jones, Gustavus Rochfort and an Englishman, Shirley), six ‘good doubtfuls’ (John Boyle, Arthur Chichester II, Robert Henry King, Francis Prittie, and Henry and Samuel White), two ‘doubtful doubtfuls’ (Burke and Daniel Callaghan), two ‘foes’ (Leader and Ruthven), three ‘violent Ultras’ (Archdall, Maxwell and O’Neill), four ‘bad doubtfuls’ (James Browne, Fitzgibbon, Ralph Howard and O’Grady) and, the only other Englishman, Robert Vernon Smith, a Huskissonite.

Following the general election of 1831, the Grey government could nominally count on 62 Irish supporters (43 county and 19 borough Members), with the Tories reduced to only 35 (from 18 county, 16 borough and one university seats), counting Daniel and Maurice O’Connell separately. Ministers could generally rely on Irish backing on the dominant issue of reform, apart from over specific grievances relating to the Irish bills, and shortly after the election newspaper sources gave a favourable balance of 69-31 or 68-32.97 Duncannon, a long-standing intermediary between the senior Whigs and his fellow countrymen, recommended to Brougham, the lord chancellor, sometime in August that others should talk to the Irish Members, since ‘I think they are easily managed with fair words and a little concession to their wishes goes a great way with them’.98 Following one of several delegations to ministers the duke of Newcastle, displaying his habitual rancour, recorded in his diary, 15 Aug., that

some of the worst of the Irish Members including many Roman Catholics and headed by Lord Killeen have waited upon Lord Grey and have represented to him that hitherto they have given their support to his government and especially to the reform bill, but that they will do so no longer unless Lord G. will adopt measures for Ireland which shall in their opinion be beneficial, that a new policy should be introduced towards Ireland: the vestry laws, education, administration of justice, etc., should be remodelled. But above all what they wished to impress upon him was the necessity of disbanding the yeomanry force; if this were not done they would not only not support the government but would throw themselves into the opposite scale. Lord Grey tried to pacify them [and] told them what he had done, etc., what he intended to do, but that he could not disband the yeomanry. The conference ended in the Irish Members retiring dissatisfied and still retaining their original intentions. We shall see what they shall do. What rascals they must be thus openly to barter their votes! If they should vote against the government they will overturn it.99

The perceived intransigence of the Irish Members, not least over the divisive issue of tithes, which poisoned much of the 1831-2 session, was partly provoked by the barely disguised contempt with which they were treated by the chief secretary, Smith Stanley. Writing to Duncannon in December 1831 O’Connell launched a tirade against Smith Stanley, insisting that he ‘MUST be put out of the government of Ireland’, and threatened that ‘we must form—I am forming—an Irish party, a party without religious distinction. I am in this more successful than I could anticipate’.100 O’Connell’s own character was enough to alienate such moderates as O’Ferrall, who the lord lieutenant Lord Anglesey thought would not care to join his train, or the 40-strong ‘squadron of Irish devils’, as the clerk John Rickman described it.101 But disillusionment with ministers later led Wallace to shift his seat to behind O’Connell’s, in the middle of what Edward Littleton described as ‘a stout little phalanx, sitting below the treasury benches next the bar’.102

O’Connell’s supporters were centred round the Irish Catholic Members, 16 of whom sat during this period (excluding Gerard Callaghan and Kavanagh, who came from Catholic families and had entered the Commons before 1829). With the exceptions of Bodkin and Daniel Callaghan, they were all county Members, drawn mostly from the west and the south of the country. Only William Browne and Killeen were from aristocratic families, though Bellew and Burke had baronetcies and the O’Conor Dons, father and son, were clan chiefs. Blackney, Henry Lambert and O’Ferrall were fairly unobtrusive, but Sheil and Wyse rose to prominence through merit and the O’Gorman Mahon through clinging to the coat tails of O’Connell, until he was replaced as Member for Clare by Maurice O’Connell. (Apart from William Browne and Wyse, whom Planta had marked down as ‘friends’, the other seven returned in 1830 were either ‘foes’ or ‘doubtful doubtfuls’.) The O’Gorman Mahon having left the Commons, only seven of these Catholic Members were Repealers by the time of the 1832 general election: Blackney, Bodkin, Daniel Callaghan, the two O’Connells, Denis O’Conor and, with marked reluctance, Sheil. At that time there were also five Protestant Repealers: Henry Grattan II, Macnamara, Mullins, Ruthven and Walker, although others, notably Smith O’Brien, later converted to their cause. Following the 1832 election, when O’Connell enforced a repeal pledge on his candidates, and the subsequent election committee proceedings, there were 39 Repealers.103

Another important feature of the 1831 Parliament was the attempt of the Irish Tories to unite in the face of O’Connellite activism. Tom Lefroy reported to Lord Farnham, 4 June 1832, that

unless something is done to recover our lost Protestant influence in the counties, and to preserve it as far as can be done in the boroughs about to be opened, the government of Ireland must continue to be given over to the Irish dominant party in the House of Commons. If we could get a majority of Members, or even nearly divide them with O’Connell, we might keep any government in check.

He considered that the best way to do this was to build on the nucleus of the Protestant Conservative Society of Ireland, to which he hoped to add another 18 Irish Members: Bateson, Viscount Bernard, Castlereagh, John Clements, Arthur Cole, Conolly, Edward Joshua Cooper, Sir Augustine Fitzgerald, Handcock, Hayes, Ingestre, Jones, both Lefroys, Henry Lowry Corry, Perceval, Gustavus Rochfort and Tullamore, plus a handful of Members sitting outside Ireland.104 This organization, which mimicked the registration and electoral activities of the O’Connellites, helped the Tories to win 30 Irish seats at the 1832 election.105 Between these two extremes, a genuine third force in Irish politics was provided by the Irish Whigs, epitomized by the likes of Rice, who by this stage had begun developing practical reform policies amounting to a new strain of Irish Protestant liberalism.106 Parnell was easily the pick of them, a dedicated researcher and writer, as well as an incessant labourer at the parliamentary coalface, who served briefly in a junior ministerial office, but proved to be too independently minded for the exigencies of government and was unceremoniously dispensed with. Once the results of the 1832 election had become clear, with only 104 Irish Members in the House after the Carrickfergus result had been voided, there were 35 Irish Liberals, who thus narrowly led the Irish Conservatives, but lagged behind O’Connell’s Repealers.107

Two-fifths of the Irish Members sat in the reformed House of Commons, including 16 non-Irishmen, seven of whom had sat before 1820; they did not necessarily continue their parliamentary careers in Irish seats and seven did not come in immediately in 1832. A total of 81 Irishmen, of whom 16 had first entered the House before this period, carried on afterwards in Irish seats, 56 of them being returned at the general election of 1832. The last to come back in were Tottenham, who had left in July 1831, Member for New Ross, 1856-63, and John Wynne, who had left in December 1832, Member for Sligo, 1856-60. Henry Lowry Corry, who was first elected for county Fermanagh in June 1825 and sat until his death in March 1873, a total of nearly 48 years, was the last Member to be in uninterrupted possession of an Irish seat. This was also the record for the Irishman from this period sitting longest in one continual spell in the Commons; the runner up was John O’Neill, who represented county Antrim from the general election of 1802 until he succeeded to his brother’s peerage in March 1841, a stretch of nearly 39 years. The longest surviving Irishman from this period was the O’Gorman Mahon, who, having sat for Ennis and Clare for some of the intervening years, was Member for county Carlow from August 1887 until his death in June 1891, at the age of 89. Only nine other Members of the unreformed Parliament outlived him, including Dering (1807-96), who left the Commons for the last time in 1868. Not including those fathers and sons who both sat in this period, at least 53, or a fifth of the Irish Members, including five Englishmen, had at least one son (in 40 cases), nephew (in eight cases) or brother (in five cases), who later sat in the Commons. The sons and nephews of the five Englishmen sat only for English seats, as did Bective’s son, Vesey Fitzgerald’s illegitimate son and William Wigram’s half-brother. Saunderson’s heir Colonel Edward Saunderson lived into the twentieth century, serving as Member for Cavan, 1865-74, and North Armagh, 1885-1906. Two of Archdall’s nephews succeeded him in turn as Members for Fermanagh up to 1885, part of an unbroken run of 154 years of family occupation of the county representation, which was presumably an Irish record.

 

The Irish Reform Legislation108

Writing to the cabinet minister Lord Lansdowne, 30 Dec. 1830, Rice was adamant that whatever reform remedies were devised for England by the newly installed Grey administration, they should be more than matched by similar arrangements for Ireland. He made two specific and prescient suggestions: one, that in relation to counties, ‘the opportunity to let in the leaseholders of a certain lease of years unexpired upon the high qualification should be eagerly seized’, at least until the completion of the survey of Ireland would allow the franchise to be placed on the footing of value ‘proved by the payment of direct local taxation’; and, respecting boroughs, that increases in the number of seats for populous towns in England should be balanced by similar additions in Ireland, though he conceded that ‘the meanness of some of our new orators would render this, I fear, a very unpopular measure’.109 Duncannon, as one of the committee of four that was charged with preparing the reform bills, produced an Irish ‘plan of reform’, but this was slightly modified by the Irish secretary Smith Stanley, who also had direct knowledge of conditions in Ireland, having resided on his family’s Irish estate in the mid-1820s.110 On 24 Mar. 1831 he introduced the first Irish reform bill, which basically retained the £10 freeholder franchise that had been adopted for the Irish counties in 1829 and, as in England, created a uniform £10 householder franchise in the boroughs. However, it was also innovative in that it would have enfranchised holders of £50 leases of at least 21 years in counties (and in boroughs, where £10 freeholders would also qualify to vote) and proposed five additional Members (for the corporation borough of Belfast, the county boroughs of Galway, Limerick and Waterford, and Dublin University, where the vote was to be extended to all scholars).111

The first bill lapsed at the dissolution precipitated by the wrecking amendment carried against the English reform bill in April 1831. Smith Stanley briefly moved for leave for a second bill, 30 June, when he pointed out the minor changes that had been made relating to the leaseholder franchise and the registration system, but this measure was not pursued during the committal of the reintroduced English bill and the period up to its eventual defeat by the Lords in October 1831.112 The third Irish bill, in which the leaseholder franchise was again altered, was introduced by Smith Stanley, 20 Jan., and its second reading was carried by 246-130, 25 May 1832. It attracted strong opposition, especially to its technical details, from both O’Connellite and Tory quarters during June and July, with O’Connell leading attempts to lower the freeholder franchise to 40s. or, failing that, to £5, and Thomas Lefroy and Frederick Shaw prominent in resisting changes to the registration system and the freeman franchise. Among the most sophisticated and complex critiques of the bill were those provided by Leader, who presented a statistical account demonstrating how few new votes would be created in practice, 13 June, and Dominick Browne, whose amendment to redistribute the seats of the ten smallest boroughs to the more deserving constituencies of Dublin borough and eight counties (including two extra seats for county Cork) was defeated without a division, 9 July. Calls for additional county and borough seats, including through petitions to the Commons, were common, particularly on the ground of underrepresentation by comparison with similar English constituencies, and Dublin University’s second seat, which had at one point been intended for Kilkenny, was a bone of contention until the agreement to extend the vote to the graduates gave it a viable electorate.113

The Irish Reform Act was given royal assent, 7 Aug. 1832 (2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 88). Under its provisions, the county freeholders continued to have the same right to vote, but also now enfranchised were £10 leaseholders for life (or lives) for 60 years, £20 leaseholders for life (or lives) for 20 years and 10 leaseholders for 20 years, plus £10 copyholders. The borough franchise was changed to include the £10 occupying householders, the various types of leaseholder (as in the counties) and £10 freeholders. As in England, it was laid down that Irish borough residents could not vote in county elections if they had a property qualification which would (if registered) enable them to vote in the borough. Like the 40s. freeholders in the old county boroughs and the £5 householders in the former householder boroughs, existing and (in a concession wrung from government) future resident freemen by right were to remain as electors in boroughs, though honorary freemen admitted since 13 Mar. 1831 were not to be eligible to vote. The system of obtaining octennial certificates was applied to all the boroughs as well as to the county constituencies, with those electors taking advantage of the special registration sessions to be enabled to vote at once, and those subsequently registering, whose costs were to be no more than 1s., having to wait six months before being allowed to poll. No election was to last for more than five days and polling booths were to cater for no more than 600 electors each. Special provision was made for the listing of the Dublin University voters (fellows, scholars and graduates, all for life), which, like four boroughs (Belfast, Galway, Limerick and Waterford), duly gained a second seat. Apart from four cases of geographical expansion (in Cashel, Coleraine, Dungannon and Portarlington), where the expected electorate would otherwise have been even lower, most of the borough boundaries were not significantly changed by the accompanying Irish Boundary Act (2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 89).114

Although it was Smith Stanley’s stated preference that the electoral test should be the more relaxed ‘beneficial interest’ one (and this was set out as such in relation to enfranchised leaseholders), sufficient ambiguity existed in the resulting legislation to enable the assistant barristers and the law courts (presided over by Conservative judges) to uphold the tighter ‘solvent tenant’ test that had been imposed in 1829, at least in relation to the freehold franchise.115 This probably restricted the immediate scope for increasing the county electorate, which by 1832 had reached a total of 60,498; since the middle of the previous year the registered county electorate had risen by 8,336 or 16 per cent, but compared with 1829 this still represented a fall of about 156,300 or to 72 per cent of its then level. Working on the assumption that the total population in the counties was approximately 7.5 million, this gave an overall figure of one elector per 124 inhabitants (including women and children, who were barred from voting) in 1832. Eight counties were rather underrepresented, ranging from Cork with one elector in every 183 to Mayo with one in every 272, but 11 were rather overrepresented, ranging from Queen’s with one in every 99 to Wexford with one in every 42.

The much more significant alterations that took place in the borough franchise did not have quite the intended effect either, judging by the report prepared for Smith Stanley in January 1832 by Captain George Gipps of the Royal Engineers.116 Gipps estimated that the eight corporation boroughs would increase in size by 44 times, from 103 to 4,531 electors (including 2,301 from Belfast alone), of whom 15 would be reserved rights freemen. In fact, the registered electorate in these boroughs proved to be lower than expected in all of them bar Bandon Bridge, and the total rose by only 35 times, to 3,633 (or 80 per cent of the anticipated level). Of these eight, the biggest increase (by a multiple of 128) was in Belfast (to 1,659), and the lowest (by a multiple of 12) was in Dungannon (154 registered electors), which like Tralee (180), Ennis (237), Bandon Bridge (266) and Carlow (275), had fewer than 300 potential voters. It was thought that the six smaller freeman boroughs would increase in size by ten times, from 177 to 1,746 electors, of whom 44 (three per cent) would be reserved rights freemen. But the registered electorate in these boroughs proved to be lower than expected except in Cashel, and the total rose by only seven times, to 1,281 (or only 73 per cent of the anticipated level). Of these six, the biggest increase (by a multiple of 15) was in Enniskillen (212) and the lowest (by a multiple of three) was in New Ross (130), both of which had under 300 registered electors in 1832, as did Portarlington (137), Coleraine (207) and Cashel (277).

The six larger freeman boroughs were expected to increase in size by nearly twice (or 81 per cent), from 1,644 to 2,983 electors, of whom 443 (15 per cent) would be reserved rights freemen. However, the total registered electorate proved to be lower than expected except in Athlone, and the total rose by only a third (31 per cent) to 2,147 (or 72 per cent of the anticipated level). Of these six (in which the rate of survival of the reserved rights freemen was relatively insignificant), the biggest increase (by a multiple of six) was in Clonmel, and the lowest was in Youghal (by 13 per cent), while in Wexford the electorate actually fell by about half (54 per cent) to only 269; like Kinsale (206), Athlone (243) and Youghal (297), Wexford thus had under 300 registered electors. The eight county boroughs were also thought likely to nearly double in size (or to rise by 85 per cent), from 17,715 to 32,858 electors, of whom 3,292 (ten per cent) would be reserved rights freemen and 4,384 (13 per cent) would be reserved rights 40s. freeholders. However, the total registered electorate proved to be lower than expected except in Carrickfergus and Galway, and the total rose by only 11 per cent to 19,647 (or 60 per cent of the expected level). Of these boroughs, the biggest increase (by 27 per cent) was in Waterford, and the lowest was in Galway (by two per cent), while in Kilkenny the electorate fell by 35 per cent to 562 and in Drogheda it fell by 40 per cent to 560. These two had the lowest number of registered electors in this group of boroughs, which included six of more than a thousand potential voters: Carrickfergus (1,024), Waterford (1,241), Galway (2,062), Limerick (2,868), Cork (4,322) and the largest of all, Dublin (7,008). In most of them, the survival of reserved rights electors was on roughly the same scale of magnitude as had been predicted, but in Cork (of 1,236 freemen and 833 freeholders) and Waterford (of 548 freemen and 61 freeholders), for example, the rate was greater than had been foreseen.

The electorate in the five householder and/or freeholder boroughs was thought likely to increase in size by 17 per cent, from 2,964 to 3,480 electors, of whom 1,050 (30 per cent) would be reserved rights 40s. freeholders (in Mallow and Dungarvan) and about 825 (24 per cent) would be reserved rights £5 householders (in Dungarvan, Downpatrick, Lisburn and Newry). Yet the total registered electorate proved to be lower than expected (although only by three voters fewer in the case of Downpatrick), and it in fact fell by seven per cent overall to 2,760 (or 79 per cent of the anticipated level). Of these five boroughs, the biggest increase (by nine per cent) was in Newry (to 1,017), and the lowest was in Downpatrick (by five per cent), while in Mallow the electorate decreased by 13 per cent to 458, in Dungarvan it decreased by 22 per cent to 677 and in Lisburn it decreased by 35 per cent to 91, the lowest registered electorate in any Irish borough. Generally, the estimated survival of reserved rights voters proved to be optimistic in relation to these boroughs; for instance, Dungarvan was thought likely to have about 600 40s. freeholders for life and about 150 £5 householders for life, but only 409 and 87 continued under these classes of electors. Declines had been anticipated in the former £5 householder boroughs, and they duly occurred in Dungarvan and Lisburn, while the freeholder borough of Mallow and the county boroughs of Drogheda and Kilkenny also ended up with smaller electorates than before the passage of the Irish Reform Act.117 In total there were 15 boroughs with under 300 registered electors in 1832, and eight with over 1,000.

In all 33 boroughs, Gipps had expected to see the electorate increase by 22,995 (or 102 per cent) from 22,603 to 45,598. The actual rise, to only 29,444, amounted to an increase of 30 per cent, or less than a third of the intended augmentation of the borough electorate (though this was still nearly twice the rate of increase in the registered county electorate). Assuming that the total population of the boroughs was roughly 780,000, there was about one borough elector per 26 inhabitants. Twelve boroughs were rather underrepresented, ranging from Carlow with one elector in every 32 to Lisburn with one in every 66, but eight were rather overrepresented, ranging from Armagh with one in every 20 to Carrickfergus with one in every nine. Adding in the 2,058 registered electors for Dublin University, where the electorate had been multiplied by a factor of 21, the total Irish electorate rose from 74,861 to 92,000 in 1832, or an increase of 19 per cent.118

This figure was still only a fraction of the registered electorate in England, though it was not far short of the sum of the Scottish and Welsh electorates. Not only was the right of voting in Ireland confined to just over one per cent of the population, which was far less than in England, Scotland or Wales, but Ireland, with 32 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom, had only 16 per cent of the Members at Westminster (105 out of 658).119 This degree of under representation, which was just one of the many grievances that continued to poison Anglo-Irish relations long after 1832, did not prevent Irish matters from remaining among the most prominent and difficult issues that confronted the reformed Parliament. However, if the question of a proportional increase in the number of Irish seats was never really redressed (and, indeed, Cashel and Sligo boroughs were disfranchised in 1870), some attempt was made to iron out the persistent anomalies in the Irish representation in the form of the Irish Franchise Act of 1850. Under this measure, which also did away with the octennial certificates, the right of voting in both counties and boroughs was defined to be in the occupiers, at £12 for the former and £8 for the latter, as standardized against the poor law valuation. The Irish Reform Act of 1867, which reduced the borough franchise qualification to £4, had no major impact, so Ireland’s electoral system, which always seemed to be far more similar to England’s than it ever was in reality, was not overhauled again until 1885.120

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Author: Stephen Farrell

End Notes

• 1.  K.T. Hoppen, ‘An Incorporating Union? British Politicians and Ireland, 1800-1830’, EHR, cxxiii (2008), pp. 328-50. See also P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 113-14, 154-64, 176-7.
• 2.  CJ, lxx. 1058-63.
• 3.  A.P.W. Malcomson, John Foster: The Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford, 1978), pp. 146-7, 319, 322; and see pp. 118, 297, 302, 313-23 for much sage comment on the intricate implications of the registration system. The strictures of K.T. Hoppen are also relevant here, as for later in the nineteenth century: see, e.g., his ‘Politics, the Law, and the Nature of the Irish Electorate, 1832-1850’, EHR, xcii (1977), pp. 749-52.
• 4.  Dublin Evening Post, 10 July 1830.
• 5.  E.g. in PRO NI, Rossmore mss T2929.
• 6.  See the section on electoral legislation in History of the Irish Parliament, 1692-1800 ed. E.M. Johnston-Liik, 6 vols. (Belfast, 2002), ii. 121-49.
• 7.  The Irish returns for the four general elections in this period are in TNA C219/200, 205, 210, 215, and the details contained in them (not always followed in the constituency articles) are reproduced in Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922 ed. B.M. Walker (Dublin, 1978).
• 8.  Manuscript pollbooks can be found in NLI 6131 (Co. Dublin 1820) and 9361 (Co. Dublin 1823); in TCD, Trinity mun. P/1/1676; P/47/1,2 (Dublin University 1827, 1830, 1831); and PRO NI, T761/19 (Co. Down 1830). Printed poll lists for the Dublin city by-election in June 1820 are given in Correct Report of Speeches at Election (Dublin, 1820), 71-97 and F. O’Neill, Stain Removed (Dublin, 1820).
• 9.  PP (1820), iii. 271-5.
• 10.  Add. 40397, ff. 384-94.
• 11.  See K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1832-1885 (Oxford, 1984) and P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841 (Woodbridge, 2002).
• 12.  Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 356-7, 369-70, 416. For a useful summary, see V. Crossman, ‘Emergency Legislation and Agrarian Disorder in Ireland, 1821-41’, Irish Hist. Stud. xxvii (1990-1), pp. 309-23.
• 13.  Diary of Colour-Serjeant George Calladine ed. M.L. Ferrar (1922), p. 163.
• 14.  E.g., in 1828 Lord Headfort applied for government support in his candidacy for a representative peerage on the grounds that ‘I have spent in elections more money than any other peer in Ireland, one alone costing £17,000, and have been the means of adding a Member friendly to government, until the last election’ (PRO NI, Anglesey mss D619/34A/1/1490).
• 15.  Rossmore mss T2929/6/5.
• 16.  PRO NI, Castlereagh mss D3030/M/39; Dublin Evening Post, 26, 28 Apr., 3, 10 May 1831.
• 17.  PRO NI, Belmore mss D3007/H/7/6.
• 18.  NLI mss 14118, 14119.
• 19.  Connaught Jnl. 23 Jan.; Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, 17 Nov. 1832.
• 20.  Malcomson, 116-17.
• 21.  Still pertinent as summaries are J.H. Whyte, ‘The Influence of the Catholic Clergy on Elections in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, EHR, lxxv (1960), pp. 239-59, and ‘Landlord Influence at Elections in Ireland, 1760-1885’, ibid. lxxx (1965), pp. 740-60.
• 22.  Dublin Evening Post, 5, 24 Feb., 7, 9, 16, 28 Mar., 6 Apr. 1820.
• 23.  Assuming that about 7,000 polled and that there were about 8,700 registered electorate, the turnout can be guessed to be 80 per cent.
• 24.  See P. Jupp, ‘Irish Parliamentary Elections and the Influence of the Catholic Vote, 1801-20’, HJ, x (1967), pp. 183-96.
• 25.  Lansdowne mss, Rice to Lansdowne, 8 Dec. 1824.
• 26.  J.A. Reynolds, The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823-1829 (Westport, Conn. 1954), p. 94.
• 27.  The best accounts of this movement are F. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820-30 (Dublin, 1985), and S.J. Connolly, ‘Mass Politics and Sectarian Conflict, 1823-30’, ch. 4 in A New History of Ireland, v. ed. W.E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1989), 74-107, plus, for the English perspective, G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1967) and W. Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds (Oxford, 1992). See also Daniel O’CONNELL.
• 28.  PP (1825), viii. 1-458.
• 29.  Malcomson, 320.
• 30.  Dublin Evening Post, 27 May, 1, 3, 8, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 June; The Times, 31 May, 16 June 1826.
• 31.  TCD, Donoughmore mss F/13/154.
• 32.  Brougham mss.
• 33.  Reynolds, 101; F. O’Ferrall, Daniel O’Connell (Dublin, 1998), p. 60.
• 34.  See S.T. Kingon, ‘Ulster Opposition to Catholic Emancipation, 1828-9’, Irish Hist. Stud. xxxiv (2004), pp. 137-55.
• 35.  Wellington Despatches, iv. 566-7.
• 36.  See also, M. McElroy, ‘The Impact of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act (1829) on the Irish Electorate, c.1829-32’, in Politics and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1850 ed. A. Blackstock and E. Magennis (2007), pp. 24-40.
• 37.  Add. 40397, ff. 372-6, 384-94.
• 38.  PP (1825), xxii. 93-105; T. Wyse, Historical Sketch of the Late Catholic Association of Ireland (Dublin, 1829), vol. ii, pp. cxi-cxix.
• 39.  PP (1830), xxix. 462. The fall of about 12,000 freeholders in fact masked surprisingly large changes in individual counties: in seven of the 21 counties whose electorate fell between 1825 and 1829 the drop was of 3,000 or greater (as much as 12,000 in Cork), while in four of the counties whose electorate rose the rise was of over 3,000 (including by as much as 16,500 or 100 per cent in Galway).
• 40.  PP (1830), xxix. 463.
• 41.  The figure of 191,000 disfranchised electors was bandied about in Parliament in 1829 and later, but this was the supposed number of 40s. freeholders at the start of that year, not the number of such freeholders who were permanently deprived of the vote, since clearly about eight per cent were apparently able to qualify as £10 freeholders and others no doubt chose to qualify as £20 freeholders (in much the same way) or as £50 freeholders (under slightly less strict circumstances and without their certificate being eligible only for eight years).
• 42.  The validity of this assumption is broadly upheld by the breakdown for Limerick’s figures in 1831, when the £10 freeholders accounted for 35 per cent of the county’s electorate (PP (1831), xvi. 197).
• 43.  McElroy, 31.
• 44.  Add. 60288, ff. 139, 158; NLI, O’Hara mss 20308 (7), O’Hara to King, n.d. [Apr. 1830].
• 45.  PRO NI, Brownlow mss D1928/F/30, 81; Add. 40399, f. 90.
• 46.  PRO NI, Primate Beresford mss D3279/A/4/4, 8, 11, 12.
• 47.  Belmore mss 14/26; Wellington mss WP1/1026/17.
• 48.  Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, 7 May 1831.
• 49.  W.T. McCullagh, Mems. of the Right Hon. Richard Lalor Sheil (1855), ii. 64-66.
• 50.  Grey mss GRE/B22/1/72.
• 51.  Dublin Evening Post, 23 Apr., 4 June 1829; McElroy, 26-31.
• 52.  Wyse, ii. 102-5.
• 53.  McElroy, 31-33.
• 54.  Anglesey mss 32A/4/8.
• 55.  The Times, 6 Jan. 1830.
• 56.  Dublin Evening Post, 12, 29 June, 1, 8, 15 July 1830.
• 57.  The figures given in the parliamentary papers are inaccurate, and they also exclude Clare and include data from the Limerick by-election held earlier in the year (PP (1830-1), x. 199).
• 58.  Dublin Evening Post, 17, 21, 24, 26 Aug. 1830.
• 59.  Spectator, 1 Jan. 1831.
• 60.  Dublin Evening Post, 26 Mar., 26, 28 Apr., 10, 14 May 1831.
• 61.  PP (1831), xvi. 197.
• 62.  NAI, Leveson Gower letterbks. Leveson Gower to Browne, 19 July 1830.
• 63.  For a survey of the boroughs, see P. Jupp, ‘Urban Politics in Ireland, 1801-1831’, in The Town in Ireland ed. D. Harkness and M. O’Dowd (Belfast, 1981), pp. 103-23.
• 64.  Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 45, omits the by-election that took place in Dungannon on 28 Dec. 1830.
• 65.  The freeholder element in the boroughs created a degree of inaccuracy, since the borough freehold registers were just as subject to error as the county ones (PP (1831-2), xliii. 7).
• 66.  PRO NI, Downshire mss D671/C/12/328.
• 67.  Add. 40397, ff. 384-94.
• 68.  Add. 40320, f. 110.
• 69.  Dublin Evening Post, 6 Apr. 1820.
• 70.  Ibid. 17 June 1826.
• 71.  Ibid. 14 Aug. 1830.
• 72.  The Times, 26 May 1831.
• 73.  Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 299.
• 74.  E. Brynn, Crown and Castle: British Rule in Ireland, 1800-1830 (Dublin, 1978), p. 88.
• 75.  Hatherton diary, 28 Jan. 1833; E.A. Smith, Reform or Revolution? A Diary of Reform in England, 1830-2 (Stroud, 1992), p. 149.
• 76.  See also, P. Jupp, ‘Irish M.P.s at Westminster in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Hist. Stud. vii (1969), pp. 65-80.
• 77.  NLI, Inchiquin mss T23/2972, O’Brien to wife, 9 May 1820.
• 78.  Add. 40328, f. 129.
• 79.  Harewood mss WYL250/8/87.
• 80.  Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform, 230-1.
• 81.  Add. 40296, ff. 1-72; 40297, ff. 1-61 (with additions); 40298, ff. 1-45. See Jupp, ‘Irish M.P.s at Westminster’, 75-76: HP Commons, 1790-1820, i. 107-8.
• 82.  Add. 40296, ff. 54-55.
• 83.  Ibid. f. 11; Add. 40297, f. 7.
• 84.  Add. 40296, f. 11.
• 85.  Ibid. ff. 37, 40.
• 86.  ‘Analysis of the British House of Commons, as at present Constituted’, The Pamphleteer, xxii (1823), 465-6. The previous year he had come up with different figures of those voting ‘for ministers’ 45, ‘against’ 21, ‘both’ two, and ‘not at all’ 32: ‘Alphabetical List of the Members of the Commons House of Parliament’, The Pamphleteer, xxi (1822), p. 314.
• 87.  P. Jupp, ‘Government, Parliament and Politics in Ireland, 1801-41’, in Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850 ed. J. Hoppit (Manchester, 2003), pp. 152-3, 166, and British Politics on the Eve of Reform, 312-19.
• 88.  Macintyre, 15.
• 89.  Jupp, ‘Irish Parliamentary Elections and the Influence of the Catholic Vote’, 194-5.
• 90.  HP Commons, 1790-1820, i. 225-6.
• 91.  R.M. Sibbert, Orangeism in Ireland (1914), i. 263-4; ii. 88, 163; PRO NI, Leslie mss MIC606/3/J/7/21/4.
• 92.  These figures are taken from Add. 40398, ff. 3-12, 23-49.
• 93.  Brougham mss, Agar Ellis to Brougham, 15 Aug., Duncannon to same, 27 Aug. 1830.
• 94.  [H. Brougham], The Result of the General Election (1830), pp. 13-14.
• 95.  TNA HO100/235, ff. 100-5; Add. 40401, ff. 181-95.
• 96.  Macintyre, 16.
• 97.  The Times, 26 May; Dublin Evening Post, 26, 28 May; Spectator, 4 June 1831.
• 98.  Brougham mss.
• 99.  Unrepentant Tory ed. R.A. Gaunt, 161.
• 100.  O’Connell Corresp. iv. 1853.
• 101.  Derby mss 920 Der (14) 119/2, Anglesey to Smith Stanley, 13 Jan. 1832; O. Williams, Life and Letters of John Rickman, (1911), p. 288.
• 102.  Carlow Sentinel, 1 Dec. 1832; Three Diaries, 206; Smith 75.
• 103.  Macintyre, 301-2; J.H. Whyte, ‘Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Party’, Irish Hist. Stud. xi (1958-9), p. 316.
• 104.  NLI, Farnham mss 18611 (3), Lefroy to Farnham, 4 June 1832.
• 105.  A. Jackson, Ireland, 1798-1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1999), pp. 60-61.
• 106.  J. Ridden, ‘‘‘Making Good Citizens”: National Identity, Religion and Liberalism among the Irish Elite, c.1800-1850’ (King’s Coll. London Ph.D. thesis, 1998).
• 107.  Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 193.
• 108.  The best accounts of the impact of the Irish Reform Act remain N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), pp. 50-64, and J. Prest, Politics in the Age of Cobden (1977), pp. 51-71, but see also Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1-17.
• 109.  Lansdowne mss.
• 110.  D. Howell-Thomas, Duncannon: Reformer and Reconciler, 1781-1847 (Norwich, 1992), pp. 143-5, 153; A. Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2007-8), i. 44-46, 83-84.
• 111.  The text of the first bill is at PP (1830-1), ii. 175-86.
• 112.  The text of the second bill is at PP (1831), iii. 267-94.
• 113.  The text of the third bill and of the various amended versions of it are at PP (1831-2), iii. 635-730. See also A. Macintyre, The Liberator: Daniel O’Connell and the Irish Party (1965), pp. 29-36.
• 114.  PP (1831-2), xliii. 5-6.
• 115.  Hoppen, ‘Politics, the Law, and the Nature of the Irish Electorate’, 755-64; Prest, 54-62.
• 116.  PP (1831-2), xliii. 3-13.
• 117.  Ibid. 6.
• 118.  Slightly different figures are given in P. Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688-1848 (2006), p. 235.
• 119.  New History of Ireland, ix. 635; H. Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain, 1832-1918 (2001), p. 5; Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1-2.
• 120.  For a good summary of the continuing differences between the two systems, see K.T. Hoppen, ‘The Franchise and Electoral Politics in England and Ireland, 1832-1885’, History, lxx (1985), pp. 202-17.